Not A Blog™

[Update: The fallout is still going strong. It feels strange for me to be on the cutting edge of unfolding events; this is not my mode. Anyway, I found this article which illustrates not only the logo in a larger format (what is with that “London” typeface!?), but shows one of the other logos I reference, as well as a large-sized image of the 1948 poster. See it all here.]

Although I don’t really do much print design anymore, I try to keep an eye on things going on in the graphic design world. Sometimes little things pop up which are of interest to a designer, but their impact on the population at large is nil. On occasion, I’ll forward something to my print-design coworker, or she’ll shoot something over to me and we’ll have a designer-inside joke laugh about it. And then, sometimes, there’s something that’s so incredibly mind-boggling that I have to write about it on the Not A Blog™.

Two years ago, London won a bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Yesterday, they unveiled the 2012 games logo. Clear your mouth of food and take a look.

Now, you may not be a graphic designer. You may not be a visual artist. You might not even be able to draw without the paper bursting into flames. And yet—still—I can say with confidence that you were able to recognize this as a bad logo. You and a hundred million other people.

I was going to make fun of this logo as is my wont, but everyone else’s criticism was swift and hilarious. Reportedly, there have been 44 Facebook groups started for the sole purpose of ridiculing, and otherwise recommending the discontinuation of, the logo. Many people have made comments much more erudite than I could hope to attain. Still, this is too fun. I’ll give you my impressions.

I realized after about two hours of looking at the logo and reading articles that it actually spells out “2012″, with the 2 and 0 on the top and the 1 and 2 on the bottom. And then there’s a little piece in the middle that doesn’t go with anything. Talk about your terrible logo design. One of the major rules of logo design is if there’s supposed to be a hidden symbol in the logo, it should be obvious when the viewer sees it. See FedEx, natch.

Pitifully, some guy threw together a logotype in half an hour that spelled “London”, but the first three letters also made a “2012″. [Following the link at the top of the page, this logo is displayed in the upper left corner of the alternative designs montage.] It was well executed and balanced to the point where it flipped back and forth in your brain while you looked at it. It wasn’t any sort of Best Logo Ever, but it was four hundred thousand times better than this piece of crap, and it cost about four hundred thousand pounds sterling less.

After I realized the logo was spelling something, that’s when I thought it looked like one of those “font designs” that aspiring designer types such as myself tended to doodle in class. In sixth grade. Before I realized it was meaningful, I thought it looked like a runner who severely broke some or all of their limbs. This is not exactly the best of impressions to give to people who are going to be participating in your games (although the people watching it might be more interested). People breaking legs! Next up: the javelin impalement. And the rest of you who keep watching will be blinded by the terrible colors of our logo.

Which brings me to my next point: the terrible colors of the logo. Before I get into this proper, I have to point out the major defenses of the logo. Aside from some committee bullshit about the logo “representing” “togetherness” and not “a pink neo-nazi swastika manufactured by De Stijl”, the main defense of the design was that it adheres to good logo design practices: it doesn’t have complex gradients, it doesn’t have a lot of different colors, it works at large and small sizes and across media (it doesn’t, actually), it’s easy to print, etc etc. These things are all laudable goals in logo design. They can be broken, like so many rules, but you can’t go wrong by sticking to them.

That being said—just because a logo follows all of these things, that does not make it a good logo. My logos in high school followed these principles. They still looked like logos designed by a high schooler. Just because something follows the basic rules of ensuring solid reproduction doesn’t make the actual design of the logo any better. It just means the logo will reproduce more reliably.

But the logo doesn’t even do that! Holy crap—just look at the thing. Look at the word “London”. The BBC throws a graphic up on their website to show it off—AND THE FONT DOESN’T ANTI-ALIAS PROPERLY! The reason isn’t because it’s a bad graphic; the reason is because they used an idiosyncratic typeface with strangely shaped counters. From what I can tell, the font wasn’t designed for reproduction at small sizes—well, obviously, because it fell apart on the web graphic. But regardless, it was a bad font choice which actually violates one of the rules that they were using to defend the design—which they don’t do, anyway! What a freakin’ mess.

Additionally: it reproduces poorly in black and white. In the CMYK process, yellow translates to—what?—a 7% black screen? I don’t even know because you try to avoid designing a logo with yellow elements in the first place. The logo comes in a bunch of different colors which can work together as part of a brand—it might actually be one design choice that doesn’t come back to bite them—but they’re all super-saturated hues, and I’d bet, although I haven’t actually done any work to verify this, that when converted to black and white, the grayscale tones just blorp together.

As I mentioned, the example I linked to is only one of four color combinations for the logo. It also comes in cyan, orange and green, all over a yellow “shadow”. (Why is yellow the ground? Arg!) Anyway, the purple and cyan combinations aren’t bad, but they’ve got nothing when it comes to orange and blueish green. These are hard colors to print with the CMYK gamut—and yet one of their defenses of the logo would be that it’s easy to print. You’ve got two choices here: either a spot color, which increases the cost of the entire job (because you’re already using spot color for the Olympic colors, right?), or you have a standard four-color print job. Simply making it “not a gradient” doesn’t automatically mean you haven’t designed it to be hard to print. By contrast, the last time London hosted the games in 1948, they had what appears to be a six color print job for their poster, and it doesn’t look like it created any sort of a problem—in 1948. I’m sure the digital presses of today aren’t going to have a problem with outputting whatever you throw at them. The point is, the justification that your logo is “easy to print” because it has a limited color palette is just plain wrong. Nice try.

So what to make of all this? It’s a disaster, to be sure. But these kinds of things can’t be blamed on the designer, at least not exclusively. No, what we have here is the quintessential example of a logo that was designed by committee.

The dead giveaway is how it’s defended. Is the message obscure? Is it everything and nothing? Can you not get one iota of what they say the logo is supposed to represent by actually, you know, looking at the logo? That equals committee.

The second major indicator is the ratio of designer skill to design fuglyness. A designer left to their own devices would not present something like this for consideration as a final logo. If regular non-design people can see it for the pile it is, no designer would be so blind, even taking into account inate narcissism. I’ve seen this happen first hand and it’s an insidious process. The only way a logo can reach this state of disarray is when it’s the result of ten people’s compromises. Too many people had their fingers in the pie.

But when you think about it, isn’t that what the Olympic games are anyway? The games are run by a committee—they even call themselves that so there’s no ambiguity: the Olympic Committee. I really am not the person to be judging the merit of the events since sports in general don’t interest me, but ever since I can remember, I’ve been consistently underwhelmed at the entire presentation of the Olympics. The events are one thing; it’s great everyone can compete on a non-antagonistic level. Fine. But doesn’t anyone notice that the presentation is giant show of committee compromises? Everything is so generic that there’s no message at all.

It would seem to be an obvious step to make each set of games have a theme, at least, but they don’t even do that. I guess the ongoing theme every year is Peace and Love, Incorporated, but every Olympics does that, so we need something different. So now, every city that hosts the Olympics has to build an Olympic venue—heaven forbid the athletes should have to use the resources of the proletariate—upgrade their infrastructure to support a huge influx of visitors, make room for pop stars and celebrities, and all the other goings on that Olympic Games entail. In other words, each year, the Olympic Committee spends more money to try and make up for the lack of creativity borne of the fact that the event is produced by a committee to begin with. This is the spirit of all Olympic Games in recent memory. This is what the logo symbolizes.

If the logo was an ironic counterstatement to the fact that the Olympics are a prodigal celebration of useless athletic skills, I could appreciate this. I could say that it was one of the best post-modern logos of our time. Unfortunately, I do believe it simply stands for what it is and nothing more. It represents the true spirit of the Olympic Games.

-Ted