Name: paris 2024 olympic pictograms - what happened?
Uploaded: 2024-08-07T04:59:00.000Z
Duration: 5 min 28 s
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Basic passive voice

Have you seen these? These are the pictograms for the Paris 2024 Olympics, but the brand directive for the Paris Games is called pictograms a relic of the past, calling these instead a coat of arms for the events. So should this win a gold medal for innovation, or be disqualified for throwing out the rulebook? Let's dive in. I previously did a full breakdown of the history of Olympic pictograms on this channel, but let's do a quick pictograms 101. The first pictograms for the Olympics were introduced at Tokyo 1964 to solve communication and wayfinding problems for international visitors who couldn't read Japanese. Good pictograms should strive for four key qualities. First, clarity of meaning. They should be instantly understandable, regardless of your language or cultural background. Second, readability. The design should be simple enough to be recognized at a glance, even when viewed from afar, or shrunk down to a tiny size. Third, consistency. The entire set should feel unified, not like a collection of random illustrations. And finally, four, distinctiveness. Each pictogram should be unique enough to avoid confusion with others in the set. Tokyo 64 established a convention for sporting events with a simplified figure in an emblematic pose, with a clear uniform or equipment for that sport. With the exception of Mexico 68, which we'll come back to, designers since then until 2022 have largely worked within this framework. The designs reached their most graphically pure interpretation at the 1974 Munich games under Otto Eicke, and in the 1990s they began to incorporate more playful approaches with visual motifs from the host country's culture, or overall branding for that year's game. Now let's examine these blasons designed for the

Reflexive pronouns

Paris games. According to the press, each incorporates three key elements. First, an axis of symmetry, often mirrored across a diagonal, like a face card in a deck of playing cards. Two, a depiction of the ground, usually the court, field, or track for the event. And three, a representation of the sport, typically shown through a piece of equipment or gear. Notably absent is any representation of the athletes themselves, which they claim makes them more inclusive, because there is no figure that can be read as either male or female. But does it really achieve this goal? This is especially complicated for the Paralympic events. Is it truly more inclusive to remove the athlete, the human being, and leave the mobility aid in the center of the pictogram? Just as importantly, do these graphics actually meet the criteria of a good pictogram? They do certainly feel like a consistent set, but let's compare them to the

Tokyo 2020 designs. Between these two options, which has better clarity of meaning? Between these two, which is more readable? Can you tell which is which between these? How about these?

Interestingly, the Mexico City Games of 1968 also broke with convention, avoiding human figures in favor of sporting equipment. Yet they still met all the important criteria for good pictogram design. Which brings us to a crucial question. Does it even matter that these new designs don't function as pictograms? Are the problems that pictograms were designed to solve in the 20th century still relevant today? For a printed tourist map of different venues, you need functional pictograms. But now you could just use Google Maps. Tuning in mid broadcast on television, a pictogram can work as a quick reference point to which event you're watching.

But streaming online, the interface will give you more specific information before you click play.

So you could argue that pictograms are less relevant in the digital age, but losing them entirely seems counterintuitive to the goal of inclusivity. Physical visitors to venues will still need to navigate around them without using apps. And even on the official Olympic website, these complex graphics scale down so badly that they actually hinder readability.

Look at this event schedule. This table would be much cleaner and easier to read without these little smashed cockroach graphics at the side. Where they're perhaps being used more successfully is as decorative elements in commemorative merchandising and as graphic patterns in event spaces. This ornamental approach does feel characteristically French. You can't help but think about iconic brands like Louis Vuitton or Ladurée, and they're known for pattern and ornament. This is the country that invented the term baroque. It's hardly shocking that the scales have tipped towards form over function. The question is why they needed to hijack the poor pictograms to achieve this effect. They could have left them in their functional form and had this decorative pattern as a separate part of the visual brand expression for the games. Instead, we have this element that doesn't quite align with the more geometric modern deco style of the visual identity and has little connection to the logo or emblem for the games. If I can speculate for a moment, this axis of symmetry concept feels like it belongs to a completely different creative direction that was explored earlier and then abandoned, leaving this as an orphaned element. We know the original logo when Paris won the bid was based on the Eiffel Tower, which would have provided some connection to this symmetry and reflection motif. But now we're left with this ornamental element that doesn't quite succeed in the role of pictograms and doesn't really reinforce the visual identity for the games either. What do you think of the coats of arms concept? Do you think it will stand the test of time or have they missed the mark completely?