Olympic Outrage
June 6th, 2007It’s with some humor I watch the outrage around the London 2012 Olympics logo. Back in the mid-nineties, I lived in Atlanta. They were ramping up for the Olympics they were hosting. And they came up with a “awesome” mascot which was announced with great fanfare.
Yeah, that’s inspiring, patriotic, and definitely a gob of blue goo. The idea was that he could morph into lots of things. It, like the London 2012 logo, seems to have been designed to be open-ended, to encourage “participation” by us random folks or some such, so we could imaging the abstract possibilities of what the mascot/logo could possibly represent.
Logos and mascots are not necessarily group sports. “Hey honey, let’s go look at the logo and imagine what it might be” is not something I say on date night. They can be witty. They can be creative. They can be unexpected. But they should probably also be straight-forward and not involve any user-serviceable parts.
June 6th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
If other people ever felt inspired to use the logos, unofficially, the olympics would be forced to sue for trademark violation, with incumbent bad publicity. That’s less likely to happen if the logo is ugly enough. You don’t want it so ugly that it’s wretched. Just ugly enough to inspire malaise.