The Games have been brilliant. The logo? I just never got it.
Despite all the guff about it being edgy and streetwise, five years later it still looks like it was done by a bunch of designers desperately trying to look young.
If your first impressions are not the numerals 20 and 12 but Lisa Simpson doing something unmentionable (as I did the first time I saw it) then you just don’t see it any other way.
Now I’d hate to be seen as curmudgeonly, and a lot of people I am sure thought it great – and it’s been plastered around enough that it has become at the least ubiquitous. But just because it has received huge worldwide exposure, it doesn’t mean that it is a good design.
The iterations on the A4 coming into London are a case in point. The 2012 logo has been used there to frame the flags of all the nations taking part and there have been some really weird interpretations of some countries’ national emblems, with a star or a symbol being cropped by the 2012 shapes in a very haphazard way. If I was the Pakistan brand ambassador I would have something to say.
There is one thing worse than the logo in my eyes. The Olympics font. It plumbs new depths that even Comic Sans has failed to do.
Tags: 2012 logo, 2012 typeface, Olympics