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.

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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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