Provoking debates is as easy and as tedious as the opinions that fuel them. Especially dull has been the debate surrounding the Olympics logo, which drew many exasperated sighs after being unveiled on Monday afternoon. You know the kind of thing: hideous, my child could do better, garish, a middle-aged version of street culture, vulgar, looks like a woman giving a blow job, shit.
People display these opinions with all the preening smugness of a nabob’s favourite peacock exhibiting his feathers to a new peahen. Opinions are so transparently Darwinian, all trying to outdo each other in the competition for attention. Sell! Sell! Sell! goes the shout, as the logo’s value plummets, until its value is so low that new investors start buying again, spying their chance to look different in the overcrowded marketplace.
Of course, looked at like this, it would be difficult to offer any opinion without feeling cripplingly self-conscious about it, so I’ll move on and talk about what I wanted to talk about, which is reverse engineering the logo.
Design is about solving problems. Graphic Design solves problems with text and images. Sometimes the problem is insoluble and you have to compromise. I wonder how much compromising went on with the London logo? I wonder how many great ideas were brought to the committee only for them to be dismissed by someone with a prejudice or a grudge?
For the problem that was set Wolff Ollins was an incredibly awkward one: how to design a logo that engages the people? From the branding website it is clear that the games are to singlehandedly turn couch potato Britain into participants. As Tony Blair said, “When people see the new brand, we want them to be inspired to make a positive change in their life.”
The design brief, which features on the press release, was “for an emblem that represented the four key ‘brand pillars’ of access, participation, stimulation and inspiration, culminating in the brand vision of ‘Everyone’s Games’.” Here we see the death rattle of postmodernism, with relativity and universalism colliding in an ugly mishmash. None of these pillared visions need to be articulated because they are inherent in the project itself. By attempting to appeal directly to children (and who cares what children think about anything, they are generally misinformed and silly I find), they have alienated everyone else.
Want to read more and better waffle about it? Try here and here and here.
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