Olympic Logo: August 8-15, 2024
The Olympics will come to a close this week, and the flag will be handed off to the next host city. Pretend that, instead of Los Angeles, the 2028 Summer Olympics are coming to a town of your choosing - your current town, the town you grew up in, somewhere you love to visit, etc. Design the official Olympic logo for the 2028 games in your chosen town.
The Submissions:
by Captain Quillard
A few years back, Chicago was in the running to host the summer Olympics. I had hoped they’d win. I thought it would be cool to have the Midwest represented, I love a lot of things about Chicago, and I even figured attending might be in the cards with the games that close to home. Unfortunately, their bid was not chosen. But below are two options for logos if they had been.
I really liked the idea of using the star from Chicago’s city flag as the flame in the Olympic torch. In this design, I made the torch become the “I” in “Chicago,” and used Chicago’s official municipal typeface for the font, as well as the light blue (and red) color from the city flag.
The top half of the design is a (possibly too obvious) nod to Frank Lloyd Wright. Originally, I had wanted to avoid using any city skyline elements, but putting the antennas on top felt like a good suggestion of the Sears/Willis Tower and/or Hancock Building without being too overt, representing Chicago’s great architecture. They also add some sense of motion, visual interest, and vertical balance to the overall logo, so they stayed.
The Frank Lloyd Wright part also is meant to evoke a few other things: It gives a vague nod to the shape of the structures that hold up the elevated train tracks throughout the city. There is a sort of “wheat shaft” or “corn” or other agricultural feel to some of the shapes, which I thought helped represent more of the Midwest than just Chicago. The shapes also seem to evoke flags of nations, as well as the motion of sports - I see rowing and others kinds of sports actions there among the “stained glass” pattern.
It’s a little too vague, but the rectangular border of this area and the green and yellow squares could also represent the CTA train route map. I tried playing with that element on both of these designs, but it didn’t work to make it any less subtle.
I liked my first attempt, but it felt a little busy for a logo (it’s hard to do a Frank Lloyd Wright pattern without getting busy). So I decided to try another.
In this one, I let the torch and star-flame be the main focus. The light blue field makes the shape of a torch out of the negative white space, and looks a lot like the Chicago city flag. The red stars (large one for the flame and smaller for decoration) come from the flag, as well.
The stars have six points, which can represent the six continents that participate in the Olympic games. (Originally, the rings were meant to do this, but North and South America were thought to be one continent at the time - thus only five rings.)
The horizontal blue stripes not only help define the white space as a torch, but also are meant to suggest Chicago’s many bridges connecting parts of the city across the river. The white space, in addition to being the torch, also represents Lake Michigan narrowing to become the Chicago River and passing beneath the bridges.
The swirling pattern on the star-flame helps suggest the motion of fire, as well as water from the lake and river; the energy of sports and competition; and the confluence of nations at the Olympics.
For the font this time, I chose the same font used by the Obama presidential campaign.
Next Week’s Assignment:
Take a photo (or photos) of a reflection. The reflection can be a person or an object or part of nature/scenery - whatever. And it can be reflecting in water, a mirror, or anything else.