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# Olympic icons
- URL: https://www.lorcandempsey.net/olympic-icons/
- Published: 2004-08-28T18:35:38.000Z
- Updated: 2004-08-28T18:35:38.000Z
- Author: Lorcan Dempsey
- Tags: Misc, UX

Like many others, I have been intermittently watching the Olympics. The Munich Olympics were the first I really registered. I find that the ‘event icons’ used there are very closely bound up with my experience of the games: many were so eonomically suggestive of the sport they represented that they seemed immediately ‘right’. I wondered why they had disappeared. This entry in *Design Observer* provides the background. 

> But it was eight years later that Otl Aicher, design director for the Munich 1972 games, developed a set of pictograms of such breathtaking elegance and clarity that they would never be topped. Aicher (1922-1991), founder of the Ulm design school and consultant to Braun and Lufthansa, was the quintessential German designer: precise, cool and logical. The design system he developed for the Munich games, all geometry, grids and Univers 55, is perhaps his greatest achievement. \[[Design Observer: writings about design & culture: The Graphic Design Olympics](https://www.designobserver.com/archives/000191.html?ref=lorcandempsey.net)\]

Spotted in [xBlog: the visual thinking weblog](https://xplane.com/xblog//index.php?ref=lorcandempsey.net).