http://www.looksfeelsworks.com/cardboard-digital-camera-by-ikea/

The choice of lead designer for the Games wasn’t a difficult choice, in Otl Aicher West Germany had one of the most prominent graphic designers of the 20^th Century. Aicher was not only a founder of the Ulm School of Design and the designer of the Lufthansa Airlines brand but also the man responsible for advancing the use of ‘Pictograms’ like his famous Male and Female toilet signs and his work designing for Munich Airport, as an added feather in his cap he was also persecuted under the Nazis having been arrested in 1937 for refusing to join the Hitler Youth. With credentials like this it came as absolutely no surprise that Aicher was the man Munich turned to in order to brand the games and he didn’t disappoint in bringing his distinctive style to the games whilst managing to capture the mood of a resurgent post war Germany now happy to lead, impress and embrace the world rather than invade it.

The Logo

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Munich Olympics is its logo and, when you think about it, that’s exactly how it should be. To call the logo timeless would be an understatement, it not only combines the fractal, trippy psychedelic style prevalent at the time but also calls in heritage from the modernism, futurism and vorticism, not to forget the aforementioned Bauhaus. Whilst it remained very German in character, the logo – taking in these dynamic artistic styles from all around Europe – also had an overtly internationalist feel. Maybe I’m applying a little too much retrospective portent to it here but I’ve also always felt that the logo hinted at the turbulent state of flux that West Germany was in at the time. The Berlin Wall was just under ten years old when the identity was produced and, the hostage crisis aside, there was also the small matters of the countercultural revolution and the Baader Meinhoff Group bearing heavily on the West German psyche.

The Typography

Given the weight already attached to the games the psychology of the font choice was doubly important. The font chosen for the games was Univers, a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface closely related to the wildly more popular Helvetica font, created by the Swiss typographer Adrian Frutiger. It was this Swissness that made the choice a significant one, the work from the Swiss design movement that Univers was part of virtually oozes modern optimism and, perhaps most importantly, neutrality. Univers is also incredibly readable and versatile in its application and has seemingly found its home in general usage on mass transit systems, appearing not only on the signage of Paris’ famously stylish Metro but also the Montreal’s Metro and San Francisco’s B.A.R.T. Maybe it’s the old romantic in me liking it as I do but it also appears, in its Bold Condensed incarnation, on the City of Westminster street signage where I spent a very significant part of my life both living and working.

Pictograms & Mascot

Perhaps the most characteristically Aicher thing that Otl Aicher brought to his identity for Munich 1972 were his pictograms. Pictograms were first used in the 1936 Berlin Olympics to help internationalise the experience of attending and simplify signage and they had become standard after the Tokyo 1964 Games, it was therefore of added importance that the 1972 pictograms were especially well designed and they were. But Aicher didn’t stop at perfect pictograms, he also created Waldi who was the first – and many people still think the best – Olympic mascot. Waldi was a simplified version of a long haired Dachshund, a very German breed of dog and one entirely less threatening than the Doberman Pinscher, for instance.  Waldi’s colouring was perhaps the only overtly political statement of the whole identity and even this was done in a thoroughly charming way. Waldi was coloured in international blue in head and tale but in the middle he was coloured according to the Olympic flag but with black and red – the colours of the Nazi Party – removed.

Stadium

Something that wasn’t within Aicher’s control but still played a massive part in the overall visual impact of the games was the Olympistadion which, with its bulging, asymmetrical, organic stained glass latticework and half submerged construction, took the futurism of the Munich Games to spectacular heights. I first encountered the stadium as an impromptu spectator at a Bayern Munich match in the mid-90s and was bowled over with it then. It still looked fresh then, twenty years after construction, and I spent most of the (admittedly dull) match with my neck craned upwards trying to work out what twisted and brilliant mind had originally imagined this, not to mention why this wasn’t adopted as the way forward for other stadia around the world. The Olympiastadion remained in use up until the 2006 World Cup in the now reunified Germany and remains an influential, if not often replicated, design. The new Olympiastadion, now less romantically called the Allianz Arena is probably its closest stylistic descendant.

Examples

Probably the best way to sign off from this post is to just leave you with some examples of the identity in application. There are many, many more examples to buy or just browse here but be sure to have a long leisurely click through some of these fantastic pieces which don’t just take in the Games themselves but also the timetables, attendant cultural festivals and some surprisingly un-kitsch merchandise.
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Images courtesy of, and with thanks to, www.1972municholympics.co.uk where you can buy some of this lovely stuff

• Had to not be in Leeds – Not that I dislike the place of course, I’ve just spent seven years doing that commute and felt it was time for a change
• It had to be old – I’m a sucker for character in a building
• It had to be quiet, a good place for concentration, co-working and meetings
• It had to have parking, I’ve done my time on Public Transport so don’t eco-judge me
• And it had to be cheap, I’ve done the flash office thing to death

I had originally set my sights on Bradford as it’s closer and jam packed with beautiful old buildings that, whilst in various states of decay, fit my aesthetic sensibilities. Strangely though, Bradford didn’t really present a massive amount of options and what there was was reeeeeeeeally expensive. We are talking Leeds expensive here. As I said, I love a bit of character but not that much.

Anyway, to cut a potentially very long blog post short, I found a place just up the road from me in Baildon which ticked all the boxes. It’s two floors up in an old mill building packed with character and quirk, it overlooks the whole of Leeds and Bradford, is on the edge of Ilkley Moor and even – in what can only be considered a spectacular bit of quirk action – has it’s own duck pond!

Anyway, those of you who know me know that I’m a fan of a warm welcome so please do feel free to drop by for a cuppa and a natter. Be sure to bring some bread for the ducks too.

The details are:

Totaal Social Media Ltd
46 Baildon Mills
Baildon
BD17 6JY
01274 TBC (still faffing about with providers right now)
07540 305 556

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Since that post things have moved on considerably and I felt I’d revisit the concept and update regular readers on the progress of what I then thought would be a nice little initiative but has since turned into a slightly bigger one.

The first thing to mention is that off of the back of this post I began to run the Bradford Social Media Surgeries which have been a really interesting side project. We’ve done two so far, in July and September, and I have been lucky enough to meet some really interesting people along the way. Also, thank you to all of the people who gave their free time to come along and act as ‘surgeons’ on the day, not to mention those that were good enough to give me lots of good, not to mention free, PR for the event. Social media Surgeries are aimed specifically at Third Sector companies (Those in the Voluntary, Community, Charity and Social Enterprise sectors) and that in itself brings its own set of challenges. For instance, how do you help a women’s refuge enter into a conversation with potential service users when their whole business revolves around confidentiality? It’s certainly not a challenge you face every day in the more straightforward corporate world.

Probably the biggest project I’ve been involved with, both in terms of scale and time, has been Fire Walk With Me, a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the original – and still only – airing of Twin Peaks. Although largely inspired by the work of David Lynch the event, which took place on the 18th of September, became more of a Warholian affair, bursting at the seems with interesting films, people in costumes, live music performances. In short, it was a rather beautiful night and well worth investing some time in. It was all to raise funds for Temple Works in Leeds which is a lovely listed former mill building which is modelled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Egypt and has morphed, via a short period of virtual dereliction, into an arts venue like no other.

So, with a few client calls to make and some artwork sign-offs still outstanding, I ambled into the seat at the back of the balcony of York’s beautiful Theatre Royal one last time and, almost completely out of charge in every conceivable way, settled in for the last talk.

The talk was from Jonathan Harris of Number27.org. Jonathan describes himself as “an artist working with complex datasets”, as you probably will have gathered from the tone of the piece so far that’s a bit like Caravaggio describing himself as “a bloke who paints Jesus and that”. Looking back on a lot of my past posts this year it seems I’ve been quite consumed by the idea of presenting information, and lots of it, in particularly beautiful ways and Jonathan certainly ticks that box in a big, fat way. Rather than hyperbolise much more about the man, he possesses the sort of profound, beat-poet Americana of Keroac, Dylan or early Woolf but manages to uniquely fuse it all with the sort of Bay Area timbre and vulnerability of a very modern geek. He is, in short, a pretty engaging guy. Personality cults aside though it was Jonathan’s work that I found the most interesting thing about him. You can see all of his projects on his website here but I’m going to just pick out a few highlights below.

We Feel Fine was the first thing of Jonathan’s that I happened across. It trawls the Social Web for mentions of the words “feel” or “feeling” to analyse and present fantastic infographics of the content. The really fantastic thing about We Feel Fine is that it presents its information back in such lovely ways, the realisations and the interfaces – of which there are many – are actually tagged back to human emotions. The database entries are also visually represented in a way which mimics the emotion they represent, so the “fear” entries act scared andthe happy ones group together. It even goes so far as to reference the weather in the person’s area at the time, mind blowing.

The Whale Hunt is a fascinating, if a little gruesome, project which uses tagged and Categorised photos to chart Jonathan’s nine day expedition with Inuit Whale Hunters using tagged variables like “blood” and “heart rate” to track the excitement – and also boredom – of the experience. It splits down in a number of ways like by cast member and chapter and you can also see a mosaic of all the images which really hits home the colourlessness of the ice and the gore of the blood when they actually catch the whale.

Lovelines works in similar territory to the We Feel Fine project, concentrating this time on the rawest of human conditions of Love and Hate. It uses the same data collector to harvest mentions of the words “Love” and “Hate” from blogs every few minutes, it then also collects the name, age, geolocation and any other data it can about the blogger and factors that into the presentation too. It’s formed through the three different themes of Words, Pictures and Superlatives and gives you an odd experience of being a detached voyeur.

Update: It would seem that the massive amounts of traffic my blog has sent to We Feel Fine has melted the servers. *cough* I’m sure it’ll be back up soon.

In the new political landscape of budget cuts and tight financial margins organisations are coming under increasing pressure to communicate more effectively with the people who use their services. The web contains some fantastic tools to help you both stay close to the people who use your services and publicise what you do to new people. Social Media can also be a fantastic tool for campaigners looking to get publicity for their cause without having the budget to launch a traditional media campaign.

The people involved in the Bradford event are all seasoned digital communications professionals who have given their time for free and will be more than happy to pass on their knowledge of how to get started in using the Social Web. Come along to The Gumption Centre on the 20th July, 5:30pm – 8pm. Click here to book your place.

Anyway, in the absence of having anything substantial to post I just wanted to draw your attention to a rather beautiful documentary. I’ve been, in retrospect perhaps a little ineloquently, excitedly babbling about The Semantic Web for what seems like an absolute age. Having had my head stuck in computers and the internet for most of my life, I find it absolutely thrilling that we finally seem to be getting to the point where using one is an intuitive experience. It’s not there yet, not quite, but we are getting there. When we do you will find computers, not to mention all other items of digital media kit, being used in a far more creative way by a far greater swathe of the world then they already are. So it’s pretty exciting, enjoy.

A story about the Semantic Web

Interviews with:

Tim Berners-Lee

Clay Shirky

Chris Dixon

David Weinberger

Nova Spivack

Jason Shellen

Lee Feigenbaum

John Hebeler

Alon Halevy

David Karger

Abraham Bernstein

All in all there were twelve different attendees and representatives from two different companies, not to mention three different parts of one company itself, and the spread throughout the room was impressively wide. We had everyone from Office Managers and Receptionists through to Production Staff, Program Managers, Comms Managers, Web Designers and IT Heads.

One of the really interesting things that came out of the day was the engagement levels of the attendees. The social graph was particularly scattered with some people only keeping up with children at university via facebook, others who eschewed the text based social space and preferred video chat, guys who use youtube as their primary channel and some people who used nothing at all. To top that off we also had some people in the room who had twigged on to the potential of the social web as a networking and professional development tool.

In Short then, a pretty excellent cross section of society.

I decided that, as there was so many different agendas from the attendees in the room, that to fill a six hour session with niche, techy, or geeky content was a losing strategy so I focussed the day loosely around three main themes:

• The characteristics of the Social Web: How sharing, rating and iterating changed everything.
• The power of the Social Web: How budget needn’t be a barrier and time vs. ROI.
• Promoting and managing engagement with the Social Web: Policy building to grow communities

I interspersed the session with some videos which broke things up nicely and ensured that I came loaded with biscuits to keep the sugar levels up. Also, I had a bit of a flash of inspiration at the very last minute and decided to add in The ABBA Challenge. Throughout the day I dropped in the titles of well known ABBA songs and the first person to ‘call’ these on the Ning network I set up to support the day got points which went towards the grand prize of £25 of Amazon vouchers. So it’s true what they say “if all else fails, try bribery”!

I probably delivered about half of the subject matter that I had actually prepared due to interesting discussions breaking out all over the place on copyright, the Digital Economy Bill, spam and how the Social Web impacts on brands. The main thing I learned from the day is to keep agile when doing training sessions of this size, be led by the group rather than your schedule.

Anyhow, I’ve already had some lovely feedback from the day and connected with some very, very interesting people. Thanks to Helen Philpot for arranging it all and I hope to be back across soon. Also, check out Channel7’s website if you haven’t already.

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont

Claremont is the brainchild of Adam Kimmel, New York Suit Designer (and fashion label), who decided that there was no better way to publicise his new line of suits than to embark on a 60mph downhill skate. No? Me neither. Anyway, it hots up about two minutes in.

Tony Hawk, the 900

This video is pretty self explanatory. It is one of the most inspiring moments that I have ever witnessed in sport, watching live as he completed a trick he had been attempting for a decade. In case you were wondering, the 900 is a vert ramp trick involving two-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Tony completed it at the 1999 x games after 12 attempts.

Mouse, a film by Girl skateboards

This is a seminal film by Girl skateboards directed by now famous, but in 1996 very much less so, director Spike Jonze. It was as influential as it was referential, see how many other films you can pick off in the clips below. Also, if you are a fan of any of the Tony Hawk skateboarding games then you may recognise some of the settings.

Regular readers of the blog (of which, admittedly, there aren’t many) will probably have been wondering why the lack of updates recently. The reasons are many and varied but the day job has been pretty hectic, lots of important and creatively draining meetings have been distracting me, I’ve been doing some serious decorating on our ramshackle 150 year old house and also I’ve been on holiday – see the pic of me and the little terror on the beach for proof.

On the holiday front, the weather in Whitby, North Yorkshire, on a north facing bit of coastline facing the North Sea in September no less, was absolutely fantastic. I had envisaged some ‘Withnail & I’ style “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake” disaster. I have somehow managed to jam my way into booking the best two weeks of the summer off for my hols. Gloat.

Anyway, I had hoped to have some posts ready to come out of draft form and into the cold, hard, critical light of “teh internets” but sadly I have been too busy not looking like a Goth to finish them. Expect some Augmented Reality stuff, some comment and ham-fisted analysis on Twitter’s recent change to their Ts&Cs and a comparison of some of the most popular Twitter desktop clients.

Anyway, here’s a cracking video from Socialnomics09 that – as well as having some lovely typography – also sums up some of the potential for Social Media. Enjoy.