*IDEAorange

Ani­mated appraisal? I think not. This is a filler piece that The New York Times has listed under it’s sports sec­tion. I imag­ine it’s there to sprin­kle a lit­tle design item into the Olympic coverage.

You can watch the video with the sound off since there isn’t much value added lis­ten­ing to Steve Heller’s voice over. I would call it a scrap­book. Lit­tle snips of Olympic Pic­tograms past with pathetic attempts at ani­ma­tion which don’t add any­thing to the story. I’m sure with just a bit more effort some­thing more infor­ma­tive and sat­is­fy­ing could have been done. Adding some labels and a time­line with dates and cities would have been a sur­vey. This piece was a meaningless.

I’m not really sure why the Olympic com­mit­tee has the pic­tograms redesigned for each Olympics. Seems the smarter path would be to have a fixed sys­tem. Then the visual lan­guage and cul­tural expres­sions of the coun­try and city would embrace the infor­ma­tion sys­tem and cre­ate it’s own layer of identity.

I imag­ine it’s about money in the name of cre­ative freedom.

For the record favorite Olympic iden­tity : Mex­ico City

For the record favorite Olympic pic­tograms : Bei­jing 2008 and Lille­ham­mer 1994

I think that Los Ange­les may win for my most dis­liked. Well, then there was Atlanta.

see the New York Times post >