General Theories -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Identity of Nations Montserrat Guibernau Polity press, Cambridge, UK, 2007 P1 the key questions with regard to identity are Who am I? who are we? Identtity is a definition, an interpretation of the self that establishes what and were the person is in both social and psychological terms. All identities emerge with a system of social relations and representations. P3 National identity is a collective sentiment based upon the belief of belonging to the same nation and of sharing most of the attributes that make it distinct from other nations. National identity is a modern phenomenon of a fluid and dynamic nature. Sharing a national identity generates an emotional bond among fellow nationals. Across the globe we find countless examples of people prepared to make sacrifices and ultimately die for their nations, and this proves that, at least for them, national identity is real and worth fighting for. P4 Sustaining the belief in common ancestry make up national identity and foster a sense of belonging which generally engenders loyalty and social coherence among fellow nationals Political leaders and agitators are fully aware of the power of national identity, it is not uncommon for them to mix rational arguments with the appeal to shared sentiments of belonging P9 Feelings of national identity are strengthened by shared memories of joy as well as sorrow endured by the nation
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity Melissa Aronczyk Oxford University Press, 2013
‘the seeds of national branding sprout shortly after the Second World War, when corporate and state leaders began to think about the space of the nation as a valuable resource in the growing competition for global investment, trade and tourism.’ p3 ‘Germany shifts its image from a federation of Länder to land of Ideas.’ p17 ‘The logo and the impact it came to have on the international imagination are widely considered to have been instrumental in the repositioning of the country.’ p35 Example of a logo designed to integrate – ‘harnessing finance to society and culture’ (La Ciaxa – designed by Joan Miro) p36-37
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Foreword: Design Histories of the Olympic Games Jilly Traganou Journal of Design History Vol. 25 No. 3 2012 ‘at the heart of the Olympic idea was a social engineering impetus’ p 245 ‘Characterized as a hybrid of urban festival and quasi-religious event, the modern Olympics have a strong ceremonial aspect that is generated by design.’ P245 ‘Since their establishment in 1896, the range of objects designed and produced to supplement the Olympics has proliferated. It has expanded from the architecture, posters, medals, tickets, uniforms, and diplomas that were part of the early Olympics, to encompass elaborate communication systems, the pictograms, the torch and the cauldron, housing for the athletes, expansive urban adornments, sophisticated stage design for the Olympic ceremonies, and a vast collection of memorabilia that includes mascots, pins, stamps, and various other products. In late modernity, the Olympics have obtained the dual character of mega-event and media event, and design plays a role in the configuration of the mediated aspects that are part of the Games experience.’ P245
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit Rockport Publishers inc 2012 ‘the heated social and political climate in Mexico City in 1968 was palpable as the world focused on the entangled country, with a student protest that ended in tragic bloodshed almost cancelling the games. But soon after Mexico was clad in the colourful and exuberant regalia of the identity program designed by Lance Wyman, Peter Murdoch and architect Eduardo Terrazas under the leadership of Pedro Ramirez Vasquez, which provided a joyful and needed contrast to the events leading up to the Games.’ P356 ‘Wyman devised the logo by combining the iconography from Mexico’s indigenous civilizations with Op art, resulting in a vibrant deployment of concentric circles and lines with the number 68 at its hinge.’ P356
‘The Munich Games presented the opportunity to show a different Germany from the one experienced in the 1936 Berlin Games under Hitler.’ P357 ‘Aicher and his team developed a colourful identity that drew from the local Bavarian environment without crossing into pure Folklore.’ P357 ‘the sum of all the work was a precise and structured identity with just the right amount of warmth – succinctly embodied perhaps, in Waldi, the geometric Dashshund.’ P357 the identity for the 2012 games ‘has already cemented its place as one of the most memorable and not for the right reasons.’ P359 (the logo) was designed by Wolff Olins in London, which describes the identity as “unconventionally bold, deliberately spirited and unexpectedly dissonant, echoing London’s qualities of a modern, edgy city.” P359
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Mexico: -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Choreographing the Metropolis: Networks of Circulation and Power in Olympic Mexico Luis Castañeda Journal of Design History Vol. 25 No. 3 2012 ‘The Mexican Olympic Committee (MOC) sponsored an ambitious attempt to unify the look of Mexico ‘68’s facilities through graphic design’ p 287 ‘Central to the campaign was one generative image, Wyman’s Mexico’68 logo, a nowfamous image that intertwines the number 68 and the five Olympic rings to create a dynamic set of expansive radiating patterns.’ P287 ‘The logo’s simultaneous ‘Mexican’ and ‘international’ associations have long been the subject of heated debate.’ P287 ‘Ramírez Vázquez and some of his close collaborators have consistently traced this origin back to the textile patterns made by Mexico’s Huichol peoples. In an occasionally chauvinistic manner, these figures have played down any ostensible dialogue between the logo and international Op Art of the mid-1960s; Wyman and Terrazas, on the other hand, have emphasized this dialogue.’ P 287 (Pedro Ramírez Vázquez – Art Direction, Lance Wyman – Designer, Eduardo Terrazas – architect) ‘The logo’s divergent interpretations illuminate the complexity of the most ambitious goal behind the Mexico’68 design campaign: the creation of a unified, ‘modern’ iconography with which to brand Mexico internationally.’ P287
‘Terrazas designed a color-coded map of Olympic Mexico City, where each of the sports venues was assigned a logo whose font was based on the original Mexico’68 logo, as well as an individualized pictogram to identify the sports events it would host. The graphic patterns shared by the primary logo and each of the venue’s logos were also given urban scale, as Terrazas had the pavements surrounding the main Olympic venues painted with them.’ P287-288 ‘Historian Eric Zolov argues that Terrazas’ patterns were partially designed to turn attention away from the impoverished areas of Mexico City that abutted some sports venues, dissolving the Mexican capital into a city-scaled ‘Op art piece’.’ P288 ‘Derived graphically from the Olympic campaign, the subway signage project operated differently, rendering visual pre-existing narratives about specific areas of Mexico City, and visualizing new narratives to reflect the dramatic urban transformations that the city was undergoing.’ P295 ‘Nowhere then, do the profoundly localized and diverse implications of global events come to the fore more clearly than in the case of Mexico’68.’ P299 ‘the staging of Olympic spectacles inevitably is placed within the negotiation of cultural and national identities.’ P300
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 LUIS CASTAÑEDA Grey Room 40, Summer 2010, pp. 100–126. © 2010 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘the iconic logo of the Mexico ’68 Summer Olympics continues to identify one of the most memorable design campaigns of the last century.’ P101 ‘the massacre, which took place on October 2, 1968, only ten days before the opening of the games, is the event Mexicans most easily associate with the year 1968. While not targeted at the Olympics, the protests of 1968 were partly instigated by the attempt by the Díaz Ordaz regime (1964–1970) to present itself to the world as democratic through the games, an image that was at odds with its authoritarian practices.’ P102 ‘their meanings rendered ambiguous by the conflicting narratives wrought around them, the Olympics and the massacre coexist in tension, ever present in memory yet uneasily embedded in historical accounts.’ P102 ‘Shortly before the 1968 Olympics began, Ramírez reflected on all that was at stake in hosting the games in Mexico. “The rest of the world, has taken a long time to forget an image of Mexico, that of a figure covered by a poncho and a sombrero sleeping soundly beneath the shadow of a tree. . . The new international image of Mexico is being created this Olympic Year. It is, of course, entirely different, but by no means is an effort being made to create a false image.” he wrote in Arquitectura/México (the country’s premier architecture magazine, published by Pani), p103
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Argentina ‘78 World Cup and the Echoes of Mexico ‘68: Internationalism and Latin American Design. An Intellectual History of Design in the 1960s and 1970s: Politics and Periphery Marta Almeida Journal of Design History Vol. 27 No. 1 2014 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society.
‘The history of peripheral design in the 1960s and 1970s sketches a dynamic flow of designers and representative currents in different geographic scenarios, with interchange between Europe, North America and South America, permitting productive transfers of translocal knowledge, reflected in the design of the 1968 Mexico Olympics and the 1978 Argentina Soccer World Cup. The two cases provide an opportunity to analyse the importation of ideas and their active appropriation by local peripheral cultures, revealing the circulation of international design trends and the processes of cultural transmission along the periphery.’ P58 ‘During the 1960s and 1970s the international design scene formed a dynamic network between the central countries of Europe and North America, and Latin America, a region with a growing movement of designers who fostered transcultural currents to articulate their experiences, trends, concepts and ideas. There had been a similar exchange between designers of different regions during the Second World War, when a number of Europeans, all formerly in the Bauhaus movement, came to the United States of America. These geographic exchanges created a diaspora of designers who travelled from the centre to the periphery and vice versa. This interchange led to productive transfers and transcultural experiences which were reflected in the design of the 1968 Olympics and the 1978 Soccer World Cup.’ P58 ‘Two of these interchanges proved crucial for Latin American design. The first is the arrival of North American designers in Mexico in the 1960s, when Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (chairman of the Olympic Committee) put together a design team to develop the visual identity of Mexico ‘68.’ P58 ‘From the standpoint of the sociology of culture, it is important to note how the peripheral nature of Latin America necessitated foreign endorsement’ p59 ‘as Castañeda explains, the notion of an official image of Mexico as a ‘modern and international’ country, was not conceived for the 1968 Games. Instead, it was a much older idea, one considered for the Mexican Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, the first project undertaken by architect Ramírez Vázquez. Since the late 1950s, then, Mexican modernity has been conceived of as an articulation of old colonial traditions with new international architecture.’ P61-61 ‘Ramírez Vázquez thus opted to invite foreign designers to Mexico to work on the Olympics visuals; he believed that a modern visual image would help reduce the international criticism of Mexico.’ P61 ‘The design merged two aspects of Mexico: that of a country rooted in its Hispanic past and that of a modern nation-state. Thus, the identity of Mexico ‘68 fluctuated between two visual traditions, one indigenous (Huichol) and the other modern (Op Art).’ P61
‘Olympic design achieved a mirror effect, reflecting the country’s hybrid origin (and its Latin American identity) within the dynamics of miscegenation, as part of the mass communication campaign launched by the government’ p61 ‘Op Art was strongly questioned by Latin Americanists for ideological reasons. Pop and kinetic art were widespread in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, and they led to criticism of Latin American culture being subordinated to that of the central countries; foreign representations were being adopted as the region’s own, to the detriment of an artistic language reflecting a continental and national identity.’ P61 ‘coexistence of local and international ideas was partially owed to Mexico’s state propaganda, which aimed to use the country’s folkloric past and its modern vision as a promotional approach.’ P62
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Munich: -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Otl Aicher Markus Rathgeb Phaidon Press ltd, Regents Warf, London, N1 9PA 2006 ‘with the post war increase in mobility and transportation along with the prevalence of major international events, the demand for universally comprehensible information grew.’ p78 ‘the need arose for a visual system of communication to bridge langue barriers.’ p78 ‘Grid systems were developed partly in answer to such complex tasks and facilitated the growing tendency to communicate information across multiple systems and media.’ p78 -
Grid system developed as a result of functional and objective typography and graphic design First developed by Emil Ruder
‘The Design program for the 1972 Munich Olympics was a milestone in the evolution of visual systems.’ p78 ‘Aicher met with Masaru Katsumie who had been responsible for the overall design concept of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.’ p81 ‘Aicher’s team chose to build on or more aptly, simplify the pictograms developed for Tokyo in 1964.’ p81 The political side of the Olympic design process: ‘Aicher stated “One can imagine that such a project involves conspiracy, tug-of-war, and string pulling.’ p82
‘In the early stages of design various visual approaches were considered. One suggestion was to evoke the Bavarian spirit by using the Münchner Kindl an early element of the city’s coat of arms.’ p82 ‘They did not wish to give the Munich Games a folkloric character, however it would be unthinkable to isolate the games from their specific cultural and local environment.’ p82-83 ‘Typical characteristics of the region, such as mountains, lakes, forests, meadows, the sun, and the city of Munich itself were taken as starting points for generating visual elements.’ p83 ‘the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin were a difficult legacy for Munich in terms of both content and form… there was a need to separate the 1972 Games from that history.’ p83 ‘Hitler sought to deceive the world and celebrate his state with the glamour of the Games.’ p83 ‘rejecting the massive scale of the Berlin Games’ p83 ‘Aicher worked with a small number of universal and simple elements that became the building blocks of the visual identity.’ p83 Rolf Muller (part of the Munich design team) said that “Aicher loved order” p82 ‘the selection of colours for the Olympics were based on an observation made looking north to south, from Munich toward the Alpes. The mountains appear light blue and white, and these were chosen as the principle colours for the games.’ p84 ‘to help achieve clarity Aicher allocated colours to represent specific areas’ p84 ‘light blue was for sport and the official colour of the NOC (National Olympic Committee), green was for the media, orange was for the technical departments, and silver was for representative purposes, such as public functions and celebratory events.’ p84 p86 – The colours extended to staff uniform, publications, sport programs, informational brochures, flags and medal podiums. ‘The colour palette for the games was both easily identifiable, and therefore effective at communicating information, and highly pleasing.’ p86 ‘Aicher made sure that the type for the games was playful and understated rather than bold and overt.’ p94 ‘planners of the Muncih Olympics focused on promoting the sporting events themselves…They also decided there was to be nothing gigantic in scale, nothing bombastic and no emotiveness.’ p94 -
GERMAN NATIONAL IDENTITY, is this attitude reflective of German national identity post WW2
p94 Aicher said in a press conference: “The berlin Olympiad was emotive, militaristically disciplined, neoclassicist, and was accompanied by a spirit of fatalism, until the Munich games this image converged with a wide spread interpretation of what was seen as typically German. In creating a new interpretation of the Olympic Games it seemed desirable to correct this one sided view.”
‘the increased density of information characteristic of large public events like the Olympics presented another challenge and demanded easily comprehensible media.’ p106 ‘of particular importance was the development of pictograms, which had the potential of communicating to a multilingual audience.’ p106 ‘Aicher’s posters carried simplified pictorial images that could be understood by varying cultural groups.’ p106 ‘the organisers emphasized the necessity of a communication system capable of conveying information visually.’ p106 ‘Aicher expressed the intent to develop a language based on pictorial symbols.’ p106 ‘Aicher’s design team in Munich believed that the clarity and recognition of a symbol was closely related to the simplicity of its form and structure.’ p106 ‘the system was based on a theory of drawing in which a meaningful sign needed to pocess a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimension.’ -
‘In this context the syntactic dimension described formal qualities of a sign’s elements (i.e. lines) whereas its semantic dimension described its substance or meaning. The pragmatic parameter evaluated its functionality and effectiveness.’ p106
‘the symbols were designed using a set of standardized graphic elements arranged on a grid.’ p107 ‘Aicher argued that normative parameters would ensure freedom in the design process, and that in this respect the design had to be seen as “a game with rules” … Aicher explained “as a strictly designed grammar, the system allows free playful application.” p111 -
RULES/RIGIDITY – Intrinsically German?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The 1972 Munich Olympics and the making of Modern Germany Kay Schiller, Christopher Young University of California Press 2010 ‘As Olympic history has shown, the Games have been used from their inception in 1896 by host nations both to celebrate an historical legacy and to aspire to the expression of their modernity.’ P5 ‘In the federal Republic of the 1960s, this dual focus on the past and the future-orientated present was writ large in debates about policy and national self-understanding.’ p5 ‘The problematic legacy of Nazism lingering uncomfortably just below the surface.’ P5 ‘Berlin 1936 might have been unavoidable, but the past was not an obsession for those mapping out the new Germany.’ P86 Modernist design was freer than almost any other form of intellectual expression to transform “the wreckage of the past into a brave new world of post-fascist modernity.’ P87
‘Eschewed ornamentation and the ethereal claims of grand art.’ P111 ‘Memorialization of 1972 has tended to caricature the Germans as hapless fall guys with a pantomime baddy’s past. Recent cinematic treatments such as Kevin MacDonald’s Oscar winning documentary One Day in September (1999) and Steven Spielberg’s controversial Munich (2006) are but prominent cases in point.’ P2 Imbalance in how the history of Munich 72 has been told, simplification of the story, not nuanced Until 72 Germany’s ‘international representation had relied upon membership to NATO and the European Communities as well as the usual forms of cultural diplomacy such as state visits, and participation in world fairs’ p2 ‘In 1972, it is clear that the Federal Republic could hope to gain much from its investment: urban regeneration, civic boosterism, increased tourism, economic development, and, of course, the chance to overlay residual images of the recent past with new narratives’ p4 ‘While the past increasingly featured in public debate about German Identity, and its variegated forms of continuity into the present were critically examined, voices stressing German victimhood and the need to bring recent history to a close still retained their vigour.’ P5 ‘By the time of Kiesinger’s own declaration of government in December 1966, the focus had fully shifted toward economic success as the potential bedrock of a new German identity.’ P7 ‘Rainer Barzel the leader of the CDU/CSU Frankton in the Bundestag, invited the country to rejoice in its elevated status in the world ranking lists for the production, trade, and social services’ p7 ‘these much vaunted achievements might have provided material comfort, but they could not plaster over the ruptures in the social fabric caused by the past.’ P7 ‘By the time the SPD won power in 1969, the legacy of Nazism had come to the fore again’ p7 ‘May 1970 the chancellor famously noted that no German could consider themselves “free from the history they had inherited.” From the conception of Munich’s Olympic bid in 1965, therefore, to the moment of the Games themselves in 1972, the past faded out before reemerging in governmental discourse.’ P7 Aicher was ‘at the heart of a select group whose input and vision gave the Games their ultimate form.’ P95 ‘he was not insensitive in his treatment of the past and would eventually propose an aesthetic marginalization rather than brutal eradication of Berlin.’ P97 ‘Simultaneously embracing and rejecting Berlin, Aicher projected Munich as its photographic negative.’ P99
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London:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------An Olympian Task Creative Review, Dec2009, Vol. 29 Issue 12 The pictograms were always going to be tricky: after the logo, the set of icons representing each sport are the element of Olympic identity programmes closest to designers' hearts. On October 16, the pictograms for the London 2012 games were revealed. There are, in fact, two sets -- a 'silhouette' black and white set and a coloured, 'dynamic' one, meant to recall the tube map. As we understand it, the silhouette set is to be used small scale for wayfinding while the dynamic ones are going to be employed in more diverse ways. Opinions on the Blog were almost exactly evenly split, pro and con, with a large number being positive and understanding of the bureaucratic nightmare such projects entail these days. In general, you preferred the dynamic set and felt they worked well with the logo... but you still don't like the logo. “As one of Aicher's team, I can say with certainty that these are not going to be useable in a number of the required applications. Incidentally, I am also old enough to have been one of Harry Beck's students. He must be gyrating in his grave....” -
Ian McLaren. 19/10/2009
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------London 2012 Olympics: THE LOOK Creative Review, Aug2012, Vol. 32 Issue 8, p46 Patrick Burgoyne From airport to venue, visitors to London 2012 will find one consistent look for the Games. LOCOG's marketing director tells Patrick Burgoyne how it was achieved ‘That all these elements, plus others up and down the country, were recognisably part of the same project is a result of a concerted effort by the Games' organisers LOCOG to bring all the many interested parties together to create one 'look' for 2012.’ -
Greg Nugent, was director of marketing, brand and culture for the Games.
"The Olympic Games is a fantastic design opportunity because when an organising committee starts [an OCOG in Olympic parlance] it doesn't have a design history, it doesn't come with an accepted design architecture. It has to build one" "Futurebrand have been our big partners on this. They came in in 2009 and their ambition was to take this beyond the traditional look of the Games. One of the weaknesses in the Olympic system is that if you look back through its history, the host city ends up with one look, the government has another look, all the individual boroughs all have their own design pieces. The question we had to ask was are we going to do something that links you from the airport all the way to the venue and back again, or are we going to put the spectators through a disjointed journey visually?" In a sentence which might make some purists splutter into their tea, Nugent claims that the Mexico 68 and Munich 72 Games were LOCOG's inspiration. "Mexico had a stronger visual identity in the sense of a recognisable asset, but Munich had a formidable approach to design full-stop"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------London 2012: The logo Creative Review; Aug2012, Vol. 32 Issue 8, p52-54 By Adrian Shaughnessy 'THE LOGO', 2012, Creative Review, vol. 32, no. 8, pp. 52-54
When the 2012 logo was unveiled, Adrian Shaughnessy was one of its many critics. But, having finally heard the reasoning behind it, he is coming round to its merits: Along with many others, I was quick to pour scorn on the Wolff Olins-designed London 2012 brand identity when it first appeared in 2007. But I find that my opinion has changed. I haven't become a flag-waving evangelist for the work, but I'm now convinced that there is genuine merit in what Wolff Olins did - even if the brand implementation sometimes makes it hard to see exactly what that merit is. I still stand by my view that the 2012 logo and its accompanying brand collateral are ugly, or, to use Patrick Cox's more considered adjective, dissonant. But I now also see the work as an example of prescient thinking and iconoclastic intent: in other words, Wolff Olins set out to create something that deliberately jarred; that was suited to the age of participatory media; that was never static; and which trounced genteel Olympic notions of fluttering ribbons and jingoistic flags. The bid was based on four ambitions: the London games were to be aimed at the young; cultural activities were to be championed as well as sport; London was not to be the sole focus of Olympic activity; and finally there was to be a post-games legacy to inspire future generations to take up sport. Accordingly, Wolff Olins unveiled a strategy that can be summarised as "going beyond sport, going beyond London and going beyond the Games". In the Wolff Olins scheme the word 'London' and the Olympic rings were relegated to subsidiary roles. There was no need to overstress London, they argued, since unlike Sydney, Barcelona and Beijing, where the Olympics were used to establish the aspiring metropolitan credentials of these cities, London was already one of the world's megacities. And if the logo was intended to live beyond sport it was also unnecessary to overemphasise the rings. Personally, I find the aims and intentions that underpin the 2012 campaign to be wholly admirable. Wolff Olins also foresaw the era of fluid and iterative identities where the logo never looks the same twice. the famous London 2012 logo, with its lack of rounded edges and its stubborn reluctance to please, they have created a truly dissonant symbol. It has a brutality that makes it hard to love, but also hard to ignore; with its palette of buzzy, migraine-inducing colours, and its angular formation, it is a bit like an elbow in the retinas. Perhaps, inadvertently, they have created a symbol that fits our anxiety-filled era.