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Latest Olympic sport: criticism

There's a brouhaha in Britain over the modern London 2012 logo.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published June 11, 2007

English nerves are still jangled over a jarring Olympic logo for the 2012 London Games that put the nation in shock - and, some say, actual seizures.

Britons expected a flashy, marketable symbol of national pride on tickets, telecasts, T-shirts and Web site.

What they got is a ragged puzzle of numbers broken into trapezoids, triangles and text message pieces to form a scrambling athlete on the run, punk skateboard graphics pumped up with throbbing colors. On video the fragments were so frenetic, the Epilepsy Association complained.

Hasn't the U.K. seen the Cartoon Network or MSNBC's stock crawler?

From across the pond, it's a silly dustup in a teacup over a brave design. Why shouldn't the logo be edgy, fast, dynamic and youthful? The athletes are.

But the Olympics are a competition among municipal boosters as well as sprinters. Get the Games and win the logo.

Half the logo, that is. The classy five rings are a given, so designers must create identity with the city name, the year, a typeface and a little extra artwork.

The latest design gets across the hip reputation of newness that the English have been cultivating but doesn't say Britain, which slights the traditionalists.

Could 2012 be shaped into a double-decker bus? Could the 0 be replaced with the circular symbol of the London Underground? And Big Ben's tower for the 1? I find the jigsaw picture far more clever, abstract but bold.

What derails it is the colors. Hot fuchsia and yellow add to the jumpy, overheated nature. In some uses it appears fire engine red and yellow, which evokes Spain or China, not England.

Almost any others, including an official variant in Nickelodeon orange, work better. The same shapes are also used in the 2012 Paralympics logo in a patchwork of turquoise, pink, orange and more and are a playful delight.

Red and blue are classic British colors, perhaps too much so for edgy designers. Brown and pink would salute the ethnic diversity of world athletes and New Britain. Or what about planet-saving blue and green?

Good logos can be literal - Moscow had proposed a Kremlin zigzag and New York City's used Lady Liberty - yet icons are also cliches and only a few seconds from boring. There will be plenty of B-roll footage of pubs, Beefeaters and London Bridge to show the Olympics are in jolly old England.

But the Olympics are, duh, sport. Give me action.

The London 2012 logo may be abstract, but it's got adrenaline. And it gets attention, which I believe is what promoters want.

We wouldn't have this tizzy if the 2012 Games were in Tampa, as some high-powered locals wanted.

They had a logo ready: a swoosh shaped like the Florida peninsula, with a swirl of stars - the very biggest over Tampa Bay.

That would have provoked no complaints, only yawns.

Chris Sherman can be reached at 727 893-8585 or csherman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 10, 2007, 08:15:22]