Olympic Logo Design

With all of the Olympic craze going around lately, I thought I’d highlight some of the design that goes into the games. Let’s just start out by agreeing that the logo for the 2012 London Olympics is not exactly gorgeous. In fact, it’s far from something that really represents London or athletics or the Olympics.

But then again, look out these designs below from the 1968 Olympics or the even the 1924 Olympics. Definitely aren’t going to be winning any design awards. To see the logo evolution over the years, check out [88 Olympic Logos]. Pretty crazy to see how bad some of the design really is – there aren’t a ton of logos on there that I would particularly like to enlarge and display somewhere. Typography never seems to be very strong in any of the logos and the colors or shapes that are decided on to express the home country sometimes seem haphazard.

The ones that stand out the most to me out of that line up are 1976 Montreal, 2002 Salt Lake City and Vancouver 2010.

There are, however, lots of designers who have chosen to tackle their own design for the Olympic Games. Check back tomorrow for some highlights of those logos!

In other Olympic related design, have you seen GoSquared’s live infographic of some of the numbers important to the Olympic games? Really interesting way to display the information and utilize scrolling. Not to mention they included how much was spent on the Olympic logo design – 400,000 pounds! Yikes!

Gradients make me cringe

I opened my email today to find this beauty.

Let’s try switching the color of the text halfway through a question, using every gradient possible and perhaps even throwing a live trace in there? Okay? Sounds like a good plan to me.

What made it even funnier was the quote at the top,”Do you feel safe on campus?”

Well, I did… until I saw this poster.

Gradients, much similar to word art, should be used in moderation and with caution. Extreme caution. It’s probably not the best practice to use four gradients in one poster design all starting from different directions.t

And the circular gradient behind that live traced or posterized image? Good job guys, you really nailed it.

The redeeming quality of this piece appears to be the fact that they stuck with the same typeface throughout.

On the contrary, here is an example of an appropriate time and place to use a gradient:

Nice and subtle on that blue there. It works. It gives off the feeling that there is some kind of sunrise, brighter day or hope going on there.

Like most things with design, there is both a good and a bad way to use everything. Stretching text? Bad practice. Using a font that was designed to look stretched? Quite alright.

Today’s lesson: moderation.