It’s unlikely that Tokyo’s Olympic committee has found much to be grateful for in a worldwide pandemic that has delayed their event by a year and set them back billions. But perhaps one silver lining is how quickly coronavirus has superseded an earlier controversy—one that I’m sure most will agree is just as severe—over its choice of emblem.
Not long after it was unveiled in 2015, commentators were quick to compare the gold, red and black stylised “T” to the logo of Théâtre de Liège, a performing arts centre in Belgium. Although the committee and the emblem’s designer both denied charges of plagiarism, the threat of legal action from the theatre made them accept it was not a hill they were willing to die on. Just seven months after the emblem was unveiled, a new one—this time a circular checkerboard pattern, reminiscent of kimono designs from the Edo period of the 17th-19th centuries—was brought in to replace it, and the issue hastily resolved.
The episode has taken its place in a growing canon of mishaps related to Olympic branding. It joins the likes of Rio 2016’s ring of people, with its passing similarity to the logo of a philanthropic foundation (both of which are more likely to be nods, consciously or not, to Matisse’s dancers), as well as Paris 2024’s bizarre torch with lipstick, already derided as more appropriate for a dating app than an international sporting event. And let us not forget the fallout from London 2012, yet to be beaten for creativity and sheer madness, from complaints by the Iranian government who claimed it spelled out “Zion” to even wilder speculation that it resembled Lisa Simpson giving somebody a blow job.
Though it must be said that, by Olympic standards, usually “most controversial” is just another way of saying “the least boring.” The irony of Tokyo’s original emblem being slated for plagiarism belies a reality that most Olympic logos from the 1960s onwards are basically copies of each other, in either style or general approach, with whatever bland symbolism required carefully affixed to whatever is the national flavour of the given occasion.
My sympathy goes out to the designers. For the Olympics—like so many things like it that have swelled to a near-uncontrollable size—must be one of those beasts that magnifies all the worst aspects of an already challenging design brief. As an elite and prestigious event, any hypothetical emblem must be both inoffensively international but also proudly national; it must be easy to apply to a vast number of contexts, from medals and podiums to the sides of stadiums; and, worst of all, it must satisfy the diverse tastes of a suffocating number of stakeholders, many of whom will have enough on their plate already to sweat too much over what is being proposed. Often this is a recipe for the kind of bland, middling design that makes you think that vague denunciations of “globalisation” might have a point: unimaginative colour palettes, abstract shapes and marks—they could mean anything!—and amorphous, dancing blobby people—they could be from anywhere!—have been for so long the go-to options for steering committees keen to avoid upsetting anybody.
With but rare exceptions—perhaps just two, Wolff Olins’s London 2012 being one and Lance Wyman’s Mexico 1968 the other—you could say that most Olympic designs are a prime example of perfunctory corporatism. What else can you call design born of a process that addresses no real need, except for the fulfilment of its own creation? Or otherwise to honour some vague obligation that says, well, doesn’t everything need to have a logo? You can’t help but wonder if most Olympic steering groups hope their emblems live and die in the same breath they are unveiled, because a swift and forgettable death must be immeasurably preferable to a prolonged life through controversy—especially when the thing in contention is, for most of those involved in organising the games, a mere distraction to begin with. That would go some way to explaining why most Olympic emblems are released the way they are: a press release, a quick burst of media coverage, followed by a brief explanation as to what the emblem is supposed to mean—usually in language that is as vague and abstract as the visual itself. (Tokyo 2020’s emblem “represents different countries, cultures and ways of thinking,” don’t you know.)
For the most part this completely misses the point of how most design is supposed to work. Design, unlike art, does not have to be sought after or engaged with directly—it simply exists. You might spot it on a billboard, or you might not. How it works does not necessarily require your conscious engagement. This is not to say that design should be invisible or that it should avoid provoking the eye; only that the extent to which it succeeds at meeting either of these conditions is dependent on the environment and context in which it is placed. Most of the time, Olympic emblems are denied this privilege. They first appear to us, naked and exposed, in an expanse of white space. Often they will be presented alongside the “actual” Olympic symbol. (Because how else are you supposed to know what you’re looking at has anything to do with the Olympics and not a dating app?) It was exactly this kind of framing that saw the humiliating trial by public opinion of London 2012. Before it could even be seen in use—alongside the wider identity built off the back of it—a consensus had hardened that the emblem for the games was bad, plain and simple. Even though its proper application ended up being one of the more impressive of recent games, that was still not enough to save it in the eyes of most ordinary people; by then it was too late.
But perhaps the real pressing question here is not whether host nations should take greater care over the visual language that promotes their events, but how we have even come to the situation we are in now in which everything—and increasingly everybody—needs to own a “personal brand.” What value is added by the likes of Roger Federer, Tiger Woods and Andy Murray having their own personal marks? Why does the Olympics, an event already bestowed with an iconic symbol, need to keep pumping out even more visual noise every four years? We all know the answer is money. But at what point does our timorousness about doing anything interesting stop us from producing anything at all?
In response to the old modernist adage that “less is more,” the postmodern architect Robert Venturi retorted: “less is a bore!” His was a simpler time. Now, so inundated with both pointless design and the need to distil our complex lives into a few easily distinguishable marks, the best we could say about today’s design culture, exemplified by Olympic logos, might be: “even less is too much.”
London 2012 and Rio 2016 owned by International Olympic Committee. All logos courtesy of olympics.com, displayed here under fair use
