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Superb. A rival to both Montreal and Munich. Thanks to the Canadian Design Resource for pointing this out.

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Logo and graphics from the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, by Otl Aicher. Via. Unfortunately the excellent design produced by Munich was eclipsed by the gruesome tragedy that unfolded at the Games.

It’s a little-known fact that the graphic icons for each sport – now so familiar to everyone - originated with the Munich ‘72 Olympics. Above, ceramic vases and shot glasses, official souvenirs, and below, matchboxes. Beautiful.

Below, poster from the torch relay, and Waldi, the Munich dachsund mascot and the first mascot of the Olympic Games. Thanks to Christina for the mascot image and information (see comment). There’s a photo of a Waldi toy here.

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.

This 1974 book cover has everything including mod 3D typeface, superimposed naked women in psychedelic colours, and an author named bureau of consumer research, in lower case. The 1970s are a foreign country; they do things differently there. Now I can’t get the 1973 lyric “painted ladies and a bottle of wine” lyric out of my head, but probably only Canadians will know what I’m talking about. Oh, 1970s, you’re so groovy.

The Russian Hall, formerly the Russian People’s Home, consistently produces typography so clear, so straightforward, so capitalized it’s almost a design manifesto in itself. That’s what happens when you try to produce design degree zero: the more you eschew style, the cooler your no-style becomes and finally you’re just rad whether you like or not.

Japanese designer and computer scientist Asao Tokolo has devised a way to tile a pattern of arabesques in such a way that each square tile can be randomly rotated and still match up with all of its neighbours. It’s much more complicated than it looks and scholarly papers have been written on how he did it. He has produced a number of applications of the design – tiles, stencils – but the most satisfying one is a beautiful set of fridge magnets which allows you to produce endless patterns of your own. From the NYT’s The Moment.