I was looking at the recently revealed London 2012 new logo at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/606/A23431826 and cringed for a second. What is it? An Olympic logo? My god!

The crazed colors and the rugged almost child like graphic images felt too painful to look at. The chairperson for the London 2012 Olympics said “This is the vision at the very heart of our brand”. What vision? What brand?

What are they trying to comunciate? Seb Coe, the chair person said “it act as a remindinder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire every one and reach out to young people around the world”. How do they hope to accomplish this with this really confused looking logo?

Look at a list of alternative London 2012 Olympic logos. Most of those look FAR better than the one that has been selected. There is even an effort to get the logo changed by a petition that was launched.

So if we consider what Seb says, then the use of jagged shapes is an attempt to attract “young people” from around the world. So what are they hoping young people would see in this image? What about the color? Why pink?

Initially I thought that the jagged shapes really stood for some thing. Could the top left hand shape be “2″ and the rest of the shapes make up “2012″? What about the dot in the center?

Another important drawback with this logo is that when scaled down the 5 rings of the Olympic emblem can hardly be seen. I am seriously thinking of coming up with a few designs myself and posting them here.

I love Seth Godin’s take on this.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 11:21 am and is filed under Logo Design News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.