The Olympic Games

The Olympics are split in to two main areas...

1. The Olympic Sports - The london Olympics will feature 26 different sports, breaking down in to disciplines and events.

2. The Paralympic sports- There are 20 sports in this area, also being broken down in to disciplines and events. 

All these idents have been taken of the 2012 Olympics website- www.london2012.com. The symbols used to represent each sport I feel are very simplistic and make each sport visual quite well. 

Locations of the Olympics

Yes the majority of the olympics are being held in London its self, but various other sports are being held across the country.... below is a map taken from the 2012 Olympics website, where it shows the amount of venues being supported by which particular cities.

As you can see 20 of the sporting venues are in London, but 6 of the venues are scattered across the UK.

- Manchester is holding the football events ate the famous stadium Old Trafford

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London 2012 Olympics in hundred of tiny circles

Jen Lamb works on a brief set by Mike Rigby at True North to design three typographically driven billboards to promote Londons 2012 Olympic Games. 

The circles are made up of the names of the countries that are set to take part in London 2012. 

This set of billboards are a good way to see how important it is to take care of the visuals far away as well as seriously up close. When you’re far away from these boards, you see lovely words set in type with a nice multicolor environment surrounding them. Then since these billboards are set on the ground, the job is unique — people will be walking right up next to these so there’s gotta be tiny detail! You can see that Jen lamb understands this and is an amazing typographer, she’s got no trouble solving the problem: the tiny circles look very nice on their own, even at close range.

Royal Mail- Classic Album Covers

One of the latest Royal Mail collections is the classical album covers, where they have selected 10 best albums after gathering much research from existing lists and polls of the 'Greatest Album Covers' in books, music press and the web. The trawl of literally thousands of albums uncovered many that were common to most lists.

I personally like the way how they have made the stamps a little different by giving them the three dimentional look by making the stamp look like the actual album cover, with a vinyl/record appearing out of it. Its a different way of approaching the classical stamp design. Designs are below.

The classic Royalmail stamps

Royal Mail is responsible for universal mail collection and delivery in the UK. Letters are deposited in a pillaror wall box, taken to a post office, or collected in bulk from businesses. Deliveries are made at least once every day except Sundays and Bank Holidays at uniform charges for all destinations within the UK. The classic stamps used are pictured below. 

1967 was the year that Arnold Machin’s National Definitive Queen’s Head stamp was released, one of England’s most iconic designs, and an image that’s recognisable around the world.  

Existing Royalmail stamps- 20th Century Design Classics

Here are some existing Royalmail postage stamps I have found. The ones below were based on the theme British Design. They released 10 postage stamps to celebrate 20th century British design classics.

1st Class – Polypropylene Chair
Found in public buildings throughout the world, almost everyone will have sat on a Robin Day chair at some time.

1st Class Large – Mini Skirt
Mary Quant rewrote the fashion rules for women forever with her daring design.

1st Class – Anglepoise Lamp
George Carwardine’s flexible design brought light wherever it was needed.

1st Class – Penguin Books
Edward Young’s book jacket design was instantly recognizable as a Penguin edition.

1st Class – K2 Telephone Kiosk
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s design bright-red phone box always stood out on the streets of the UK.

1st Class – Routemaster Bus
Once a symbol of London to visitors from all over the world now only a few of Douglas Scott and Colin Curtis’s remain on London’s streets.

1st Class – Supermarine Spitfire

The superlative Battle of Britain fighter with its distinctive elliptical wings was designed by R J Mitchell who sadly died before the plane went into production.

1st Class – London Underground Map

Harry Beck’s easy to understand design was based on an electrical wiring diagram.

1st Class – Concorde
Aerospatiale and BAC’s supersonic jet was capable of twice the speed of sound and beautiful to look at too.

1st Class – The Mini

Sir Alec Issigonis made use of every available space in the small car that was as much a fashion statement as a means of transport.

The 2012 London Logo

This Logo was designed by Wolf Olins. The publics perception of the final logo is not great, there has been much hysteria condemnation around it. On this basis Daniel Eatock decided to design an alternative for the logo.

His alternative logo is a composite of two icons:

1. The Olympic Rings

2. RAF roundel, asscoiated with the British pop art for the 1960s, appearing in paintings by Jasper Johns and Peter Blake, seen below.

The RAF Roundel

Painting by Jasper Johns

Painting by Peter Blake

So combining these two iconic symbols, Daniel Eatock came up with the alternative design below....

The Olympics Logo

The famous Olympics Logo seen below, is called the Olympic rings, which was created in 1913 by Pierre de Coubertin. The 5 rings  that interlock represent that 5 continents, by the different colou

As well as the iconic rings logos, where ever the Olympics is held that year, they have a seperate logo. Below are the 39 Logos over the years, starting from the first ever Olympics in held in Paris in 1924, to the most resent being in London in 2012.