http://www.boredpanda.com/creative-ads-using-oversized-objects/

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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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.

The Social Marketing Compass

This is a lovely graphic from renowned writer, analyst and speaker Brian Solis which sets out a very clear and well thought through vision of the social marketing universe with Brand as the Sun. Like or loathe the Marketing Speak element of the graphic it’s very eloquently put and has some real resonance.

Click for the full graphic

The Story of Twitter

Twitter has finally shed its New Kid on the Block image and is now firmly established as the tool de jour for quick and easy engagement.This graphic charts the journey between its birth and third birthday, see if you can remember a few of those watershed moments. I know I can.

Click for the full graphic

Facebook Growth

This is a lovely snapshot of the exponential (if that’s not too weak a word) growth of Facebook’s users. In six years the site has gone from a college dorm room project to one of the biggest new media companies in the world. To pick a stat out of the ether, 50% of users log-in every day. How amazing is that?

Click for the full graphic

Thanks for making this a fun series to do, as suggested I’ll definitely continue and if you have any requests or spot something you think warrants a mention then let me know.

Top 50 Earners in World Football

This is by the aforementioned Ben Huxley of Visual Evolution, the guy who also contributed to Totaal’s silliest ever blog post, who deconstructed the stats for the 50 best paid footballers and laid it out pretty nicely. The idea that Man City’s Emmanuel Adebayor earns a salary equivalent to 26,471 of his fellow countrymen/women is mind boggling. He also did this slightly more gruesome effort.

The Great Bear

Sort of more of a work of labyrinthine graphic punnage than a straight up infographic, The Great Bear has been hung in the Totaal office ever since we kicked off. It’s a lovely interpretation of the masterly Harry Beck‘s original London Tube Map with the lines replaced by Philosophers, Planets, Actors, Footballers etc. It’s not so much the lines themselves that are interesting but it’s the intersections of the lines in this that bring up the most interesting results, you may have to squint a little but it’s more than worth it.

Left Vs. Right

What with the GeneralElection having just been called I thought it would be timely to include this information packed infographic on the beliefs of people on each side of the US Left/Right political scale. Maybe it’s the blurring of international boundaries, the colonial legacy or the fact that our politicians are, to a man, obsessed with US politics but about 90% of this holds water on this side of the Atlantic too.

More tomorrow!

The Social Media Effect

A nice lo-fi graphic which charts the amplifying effect of the social web on the most common online currency unit of the day, an item of content. The best thing that this illustrates is the “trickle-down” fashion of content from the most immediate networks like Twitter and Digg right the way through to google and network features.

Click Here for the full graphic

The History of Location Technology

The geolocation feature on smartphones has led to an absolute revolution in how mobile technology is used in the modern day and this graphic takes us right the way through the history of  location technology from smoke signals to the modern day.

Click Here for the full graphic

How the World Engages with the Social Web

This lovely graphic charts how the different countries surveyed interact with the social web covering the whole gamut of interaction from access, blogging, microblogging, Social Network use and video/photo uploads. A random fact from this: In China the equivalent of almost twice the population of the UK share photos and videos online. Wow.

Click on the image for the full graphic

The Six Different Behaviour Types of the Web

This, sadly US only, graphic charts the behavioural habits as well as the ages and number of the six major types of content consumers on the web. Are you a creator, a critic, a collector, a joiner, a spectator or an inactive? I’m cool with you as long as you are an inactive, I really hate you guys.

Click Here for the full graphic

Google Infographgraphic

Pingdom have pulled together this fantastic visual from all of the information on Google they have been able to scrape out from down the back of the internet’s sofa. And yes, it really has gone from a geek’s daydream to the biggest media organisation in the world in fifteen years.

Click for the full graphic

Social Media Landscape

This one is absolutely lovely, it distills a good few hours of client contact into about ten minutes of chartsurfing. Some of the info I would have to take issue with but it’s largely spot on and about as close to a ‘one size fits all’ solution as you are likely to get. It’s been commissioned by the guys over at CMO and really nicely done by the pixel pushers at 97th Floor.

Click for the full graphic

More to follow tomorrow, if you have any to add please stick them in the comments section below.