August 08, 2008, set the date where another historic day officially marked in the international sports world diary.. the Olympic, China 2008 has finally arrived. Looking through the promotion posters, I always had a question of how would it look like when the Olympic games first started. I’m not really want to talk about the games here, what I really want to share with you guys is about the time line of the creative evolution, innovations and ideas in graphic design elements on the Olympic posters itself.
Let’s take a look at few of Olympic posters which I think has a strong conceptual design ideas.
1896 - Actually there is no official poster was made for the first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, Greece but this photo always refer to the Games of the I Olympiad. As you can see, there’s one lady standing, illustrated as representing the goddess Athena holding the branch of wild olive which symbolizing victory.
1904 - This was actually is the reproduction of the cover for the programme of the Olympic games itself. The design can merely claimed similar as a concept they used for a poster for classic theater during that time, with an aerial view of a drawing of St-Louis city.
1912 - The poster picturized a parade of nations, where there are few athletes carrying a twirling flag of each participating country all going towards the main Olympic games. This poster has not been distributed in some other countries since the nudity of the athletes being criticize seriously by some parties which actually refers as the games antiquity.
1928 - The design was simple, picturing a symbol of victory by an athlete running while holding a laurel branch. The idea was easy where you can see three wavy lines in blue, white and red which represent the colours of the Dutch national flag as the home of the Olympic games during that time.
1968 - I really like the concept with this poster which been distributed in the Olympic games in Mexico, the black and white lines actually refers to the famous patterns of the Huichole Indians, an indigenous ethnic group of western central Mexico. The poster design came up first with a collaboration of three person, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez (architect), Eduardo Terrazas (President of the Organizing Committee of the Games itself) and an American, Lance Wyman (who originally designed the Mexico 86 logo).
1988 - A combination of perspective lines and rendered bright light which were done with computer graphic techniques has bring this poster to represent the Olympic games in Seoul. The concept was “Harmony and Progress” where as you can see the light blue and bright orange colours were blended together to symbolise Korea as the Land of Morning Calm.
1996 - Another poster design which I really love is this one, using a combination of 6 spot colors to become one. Juan Antonio Samaranch, acting as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President during that time has chosen this drawing to be used as the official poster for the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta. This brilliant ideas was named “The Look of the Games” and originally drawn by an artist call Primo Angeli.
2012 - Until now, there’s no official promo poster yet for the 2012 Olympic games in London, but there is official logo for it. This logo design has brings the world for the first time where the same logo will be used for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The jagged emblem, based on the year written 2012, graphically captures the essence of the London 2012 Olympic Games in which the design itself cost around £400,000 and comes in a series of shades of various color like pink, blue, green and orange which later will evolve in the run-up to the Games.
I wonder when will be the Olympic games to be host in my country, Malaysia..
Get inspired guys!
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Vitaly S Alexius, a young talented illustrator and a great digital painter, was born in the year 1984, in Novokuznetsk, Siberian Russia. Since he was four, Alexius has been fascinated by drawing a tiny star ships and celestial life. Since 2000, his been tutoring on the subject of drawing and painting, only by the year 2002, he learned Photoshop and have been using it ever since, to develop an innovative, digital-art style, which he claim to call it “Dreaminism”.
