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

The press industry is having a bit of a hard time at the moment, and don’t we know it. On a national level several of the biggest UK newspapers – titles like the Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Express – are rumoured to be looking at making serious cuts to editorial staff, with journalists and the humble but vital subbers being the ones getting it in the neck more often than not. The issue has reached such a pique that it’s even been debated on the floor of the House of Commons with the then Minister for Culture Media and Sport, Andy Burnham, offering the luke warm comfort that “Lord Carter is considering how to sustain quality news provision across all media at a local level as part of the final “Digital Britain” report”. Which was received about as enthusiastically as a hybrid car on Top Gear.

On a regional level in the UK the *ahem* news is, if anything, less positive. With staff being made redundant from major regional titles in Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and countless other cities across the UK. The real casualty of the year though, is the London regional press. Competing freesheets The London Paper and  London Lite both hit the buffers over the past year and a bit with only the doughty, stoic Metro remaining. Even the once preeminent evening paper of London, the Evening Standard, having seemingly fought off competition from its free rivals, is itself set to become a freesheet.

It’s safe to say then, that 2009 was very much a bad year to be in newspapers and it’s pretty much the same world wide. Why is this though? Are journalists effectively being laid off because they cant do their jobs or are too expensive all of a sudden? Of course not, journalists the world over are getting the boot because the industry they work for is no longer viable, the business model is broken. The, often very talented, intelligent and savvy people are finding their selves out of a job because consumer habits have turned away from a model which has worked, on one level or another, for a good couple of hundred years.

Take a look at the ad above, you’ve probably seen it before and might even have found it funny. It was originally dreamed up for The Sun’s 40th anniversary celebrations and meant for a viral only campaign. Eventually the campaign went big though so they decided to give it a TV Run. The strange thing about it though is that it, and it’s funnier follow up, both illustrate quite how obsolete the medium of the newspaper is. It looks anachronistic, quaint even, when set against the uber-modern template of the iPhone ads, even with a tongue in cheek approach.

I’m not going to lay out all of the reasons why I, and for that matter all the reasons others, think that traditional media like newspapers are failing. The threats to their markets are everywhere from podcasts, better mobile 3g coverage, changes in the habits in which people consume their media and even the humble internet. You can debate these all you want but Newscorp, owner of everything from Fox and Sky to The Sun and The Times place the blame firmly at the feet of the internet as their main threat. In typical old media fashion Rupert’s gang have fired the first shot across the bows of Google by blocking their search bots from The Times’ site. You could say that Rupe is still smarting from the somewhat less than resounding success that was Newscorp’s acquisition of the old and busted myspace for a whopping $580 back in 2005.

In my mind the myspace disaster is probably a great test case in the difficult relationship between old and new media. Newscorp’s shiny new myspace got beaten beaten by the upstart Facebook, now ironically worth many, many times what myspace was sold for, and from that point Newscorp essentially took their ball home. Game over.

So where is the solution in all of this? Rather oddly I believe it’s The Guardian who have got the right ideas to cope with the future of publishing. I say rather oddly because if you were paying attention I mentioned them at the start of this post as being one of the ones with the threat of redundancy over their staff, in fact they also owned MEN Media who made many journalists redundant in 2009 and, to top it all off, their parent company, Guardian Media Group, lost £90m last year. Strange choice you might say then. Well yes and no.

The Guardian create – for my money at least – far and away the best online content of any organisation bar the BBC. This content isn’t just well regarded by those in the UK, I constantly get friends from India, Malaysia, Canada, The US and even Serbia linking to me to Guardian stories. Their podcasts are also fantastic and some of their video reporting would more than stand up to that of half of the UK’s terrestrial channels. It’s not just good journalism though, it’s innovative journalism. When the story of the MP’s Expenses Scandal broke The Guardian did something very, very clever and published all the leaked documentation onto the internet and asked their readership to scrutinise the very people they elected. As we all know, there’s nothing like a bit of local interest to spike someone’s attention and it soon began to yield it’s fair share of stories, Duck Islands, Moat Cleaning, Hob-Nobs and all. This simply wouldn’t have been possible without ‘citizen journalism’. What’s more they’ve also just launched an iPhone app which will, I promise you, blow your mind with just how great it is.

So in short, the coming decade’s successful media organisation will have to constantly reinvent it’s model. It will need to sometimes absorb a loss and it will definitely have to engage and enthuse its readers to make them part of the story. As a model press on its own is very probably a busted flush however, using the internet well – and by that I mean wringing every drop of value possible from it – must surely be the only way forward if there is any hope for survival for some of the oldest and most respected newpaper titles in the world.

Yorkshire Events, the guys I am currently working with, won their bid for the 2010 UCI Mountainbiking XC World Cup. I’m absolutely made up that we won it as I was desperate for it to get the recognition it deserves. The real kicker is that, particularly with bid stuff, nobody wants to know if you didnt win the event. This wouldve meant something I was very proud of would be the proverbial ginger stepchild.

Understanably the World Cup bid has been a bit of a long shadow on the horizon for me for a while. It’s been hovering over me like the sword of Damocles, having submitted the bid in late April and it’s actually one of the things that I am most proud of in my career, certainly the item of print I’m most proud of.  To say it was just print though would be doing it a bit of a disservice,  it was a very complex project made up of two bid books, a part CGI part live action DVD and a gorgeous presentation box. I had the pleasure of working with a slew of very good people who all pulled together in the right direction to pull it off.

I’ll post some of the beautiful stills as well as the excellent bid DVD in the next week or so.