Everyone hates the 2012 logo

It strikes me that it must be a very tough job being a brand consultancy. Poor Wolf Olins have come in for a seemingly universal kicking following the big reveal of their newly designed 2012 Olympics logo.

As the internet continues to flood with logo spoofs (see the fantastic David Brent parody below) along with all sorts of petitions for and against I began to wonder what went wrong? In my mind there are two issues at stake.

Firstly unlike print advertising communication logos are devoid of overt narrative. There is no clever story or event being depicted which an audience can recognise and then choose to empathise with or reject- the key thing here is that in advertising they have at least some basis for making a choice in the first place. When stripped of all narrative/context the viewer has nothing but instinctive subjective opinion to fall back upon. Now i'm not saying this is a bad thing. Far from it. It's just that in my experience when intelligent individuals have no evidence to substantiate an opinion it tends to jarr slightly. They find it frustrating not to have a 'safe' fall back point of view. They have to offer a response based upon precisely what they think rather than unconsciously adopting a publically acceptable viewpoint. In the 2012 logo example what you have got is some people saying "I like it" and others saying "I don't like it" consequently there is no way for the discussion to move on. In a state of deadlock people begin clutching at straws and under pressure to find some leverage come to proffer fatuous marketing semantics that once taken out of the boardroom context only serve to undermine one's perspective still further. Hence the uproar following Olympic officials being quoted as saying.

"It [the logo] will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world. It is an invitation to take part and be involved"

Yeah...ok? Personally I feel a touch let down. It doesn't speak to me about the spirit of our age today. It speaks to me about the 1980s of pills and the birth of rave culture...perhaps not the images i want to associate with the pinnacle of athletic prowess. Then there is the colour.....!

The second and possibly more important point this debacle made me think about was that dark side of the communications industry namely post rationalisation. Inevitably there was probably some planning brain at Wolf Olins who thought he/she'd managed to distill the brand essence and spirit of the Olympics into a cloud of words on a single A4 page off of which creatives and designers started their work.

In my mind this is going about things arse first. Wouldn't it have been smarter to involve anyone and everyone in the process of designing the logo and then afterwards inviting anyone and everyone to suggest what each logo or representation says to them, the internet would have been fantastic at this. Do it first comment on it second. This way superb graphic design can emerge free from the constraints of contrite brand values being shoehorned in at the start. A great image comes to symbolise an age not the other way around...surely? So when i look at the stunning Mexico 1968 logo below i've got no clue what the values it is meant to embody are but to me it seems both iconic and evocative of the age.