Ignoring the problems of hosting the Olympics, which are serious and many (and as a Vancouverite I’m speaking from experience), let’s just compare the graphic design from two different Canadian Olympics. The Montreal graphics were uniformly brilliant. It’s considered bad form to criticize the Vancouver 2010 graphics because of the tragic death of the head designer at a young age, but I don’t know, this is not a 2010 Olympics-promotion blog. Pax all those people who like the Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphic identity – and the corresponding new 2010-related City of Vancouver signage – but to me they all look very strongly like the unfortunate love-child of feminine hygiene packaging and corporate clip art designed by committee. Messy, busy, commercial, and they look like the bad Illustrator photo-traced layers they are. Vancouver, how many more design failures will you tolerate? Of course, a city that will build a dried-blood-coloured main library in the shape of the gladiatorial coliseum in Rome (and I can hardly believe I’m describing reality in that sentence: a library in the form of a blood-sport arena!) is capable of large-scale mistakes. See a longer post on the beautiful Montreal Olympics graphics on this blog, and more Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphics on the CDR. For the politically-incorrect 2010 Olympic logo debacle, see the CBC. [Update Feb 13: Douglas Coupland had this to say in conversation with the New York Times:

NYT: I see there is controversy over the design of the official Olympics logo, which is based on the Inuit stone marker known as an Inukshuk.
DC: Inuit culture is north of here, in the Canadian Arctic, and it has nothing to do with the lives of anyone in British Columbia. If you want to use the First Nations motifs for your logography, use the ones that are actually from here. A lot of people are kind of cheesed off.

I voted against these Olympics and am extremely annoyed by their crippling social and financial costs, their corporate profiteering and their draconian trouncing of free speech, but if they’d had good graphic design, I could have put politics aside and given them credit for that at least. Instead, Vancouver has been handed what it perhaps deserves, weak design that wouldn’t even make the qualifying round for a design Olympics if there were such a thing.

Feminine hygiene packaging. That’s what this is.

On a trip with friends to the west coast of Vancouver Island one summer, I found a Holly Hobbie mug that had washed up on shore. The next morning I showed it to my friend Jonathan, who was cooking us breakfast.

Me:  Look! Isn’t that sweet. “Good friends are like sunshine…”

J:  They come around every couple of weeks.

Me:  And give you cancer.

For those who don’t live in this part of the world, the line about the sun coming around every couple of weeks identifies this as a Pacific Northwest joke. Listen, the reason I’m bringing up Holly Hobbie and her ilk is that I’m going to implode if I don’t say something about the Rise of Cute. A scary proportion of the highest-traffic decor blogs and sites, not mentioning any names, has lately undergone some sort of bodysnatching by a powerful, unholy agglomeration of down-home samplers, gingham, cutesy illustrations of big-eyed, bonneted little girls in country dresses, grandmothery country kitchens, wan girls on bicycles, wan girls doing nothing but looking wan, posters with bromide-y mottos, lace, doilies, frilly stationery, tiny flower arrangements, illustrations of birdies on branches, tiny flower prints, early childhood decor in apartments not even occupied by children, general pinkness and the whole gamut of unrehabilitatable little-girl kitsch. The words “sweet,” “precious” and “darling” are appearing with a frequency that’s becoming really alarming.

This Little House on the Prairie Redux – all these children in patchwork and smiling women in frocks with their forearms dusted in flour – seems to be harking back to a simpler time that frankly never existed and even if it had, god forbid. Quite apart from my aesthetic recoil from this particular category of kitsch, I’m worried that on a broader level its flight from reality is an indicator of a politically conservative retrenchment. There’s also a lot of safe, semi-but-not-really-updated Edwardian or Victorian genteel traditionalism around in decor. It’s not as bad, but definitely on the same continuum. The Neo-Stuffy traditionalism of all this airless decor isn’t just mildly backward-looking. A lot of it actually feels like a disposal not just of adulthood, adventurousness and any engagement in our real historical moment, but of feminism, too, which is all the more distressing when this region of the internet, with its multimillion-dollar glut of cutesy decorative craft, is so completely female-dominated. More and more I’m having moments of wanting to stab myself in the eye with a fork. I can already hear people saying “live and let live” and “to each her own” and all that, but culture and aesthetics are not comfortably separate from the rest of the social realm; they’re not meaningless, sheerly personal follies. They’re the thin end of the wedge of politics and philosophy. I’m sorry to be ornery, but as Lizzie Bennet liked to say, I speak as I find. And what I find is that this Cute Utopia is my dystopia. [Stomps foot.]

Click below. And if you think I’m exaggerating, click here.

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For months I’ve been meaning to start up a regular feature about the worst in decor – maybe call it Chamber of Horrors or something – but I haven’t had the heart for it. For one thing, locating the kitschy and the hideous and then mocking it is like shooting fish in a barrel and it isn’t very nice. For another, there’s no way to compete with the compendiums of design disasters that other people have already put together:  Ugly House Photos or Eurobad ‘74, for example, or if those don’t satisfy your appetite for disaster, there’s also an endless supply of frightening objects on Flickr. Or on the craft end of things, try Regretsy. But I still want to be able to tear things apart on occasion so I’ve decided to do an occasional Monday feature on things from the world of supposedly high design that many people seem to like, but that for whatever reason – and maybe that’s what I’m trying to figure out – I consistently hate. I’m starting with Alessi. The corkscrew above, Marilyn with her dress blown up over the grate, actually makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork. Don’t even get me started about Alessi. Or do, by clicking below. Please feel free to weigh in.

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Only 32 years have passed since this fantastic official poster for the 1976 Montreal Olympics was produced, but from a 2008 vantage point it’s hard to imagine how a committee ever okayed it. Whoever they were, they were in Montreal, it was 1976, and they were probably wearing something groovy. See here. With the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics coming up and with the athletes’ village not that far away from our Chinatown studio, it’s getting hard to ignore the sad new state of official Olympic design. The phrase “corporate clip art” comes to mind with every new design the Vancouver Olympic committee puts out, and that seems to be an Olympic trend. Some of it looks distinctly like it might be selling feminine hygiene products. The 60s and 70s design – graphic as well as interior and architectural – seems more fearless, open, uncluttered and somehow international in its outlook, and the Montreal designs had all of these virtues. It’s just inconceivable to imagine the bold, edgy yet friendly poster above being sanctioned by any Olympic Committee in these newly staid, conservative times. And forget about edginess. Vancouver won’t even be getting just good, basic graphic design let alone anything as deft and good-looking as the instant classics that Montreal managed to produce – see below. Also see the Canadian Design Resource on the topic of what has happened to Olympic design in general. I particularly like the fact that in 1976 the Canadian government issued well-designed official Olympic posters showcasing then-cutting-edge contemporary art (bottom right). Can you imagine that happening now? My favourite of the 1976 posters below, though, is the wavy white Olympic logo on red. Beautiful and simple – and so is the beaver “Amik” mascot. Nostalgia may be a weakness, but if design were better who would need to indulge in it.

More here and here.

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