Hasta La Ideas

Graduate designer Jordon Cheung provides an alternative to the official London 2012 Olympic memorabilia with these posters and prints illustrating equipment for the Games.

The 17 Days of Summer series includes the Torch at its centre and medals close by, surrounded with bikes, rackets, javelins, oars, balls, sportswear and more, all picked out in a palette of five colours.

There’s also a series of prints combining sporting equipment with the first letter of the relevant event.

“Designing anything linked to the games is very restrictive, so I opted not to include any official branding,” says Cheung. More on that here.

He recently graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, and the posters are available from Fab UK.

If you like these, check out Michael Robinson‘s poster commemorating this summer’s weather and Games, or Sarah Hyndman’s unofficial Olympic posters featuring everyday objects.

See all our stories about design for the London 2012 Olympics »
See all our stories about posters »

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It’s the last day of our Dezeen Olympics and surprisingly all of the most pinned stories about the events of London 2012 aren’t directly related to the actual games, such as these Jaffa Cakes nibbled into British icons and landmarks that take the gold medal.

The new logo for British Gymnastics that replicates the movements of a gymnast wins the silver medal.

Bronze is awarded to the official posters created for the Olympic and Paralympic Games by leading British artists.

See the previous medal winners and all our Olympic stories here.

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Olympic designs appeared first on Dezeen.

The London 2012 Olympics continue and so do the Dezeen Olympics, awarding medals to the design and architecture of the games. Today’s competition is for the most tweeted stories about our coverage and we give the gold medal to Banksy’s Olympic-inspired street art.

New London Architecture chair Peter Murray wins the silver medal for his t-shirt protest against the marketing agreement set out by the London 2012 organisers that prevents architects publicising their work.

Along a simliar theme, the bronze medal is awarded to unofficial posters for the games that allow businesses to sidestep the strict marketing rules.

See the winners of most popular, most commented and most liked on Facebook, and have a look at all our stories about the London 2012 olympics here.

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Dezeen Wire: democratic nations won’t be able to host the Olympics in future due to increasing tensions between the public interests of democracies and the commercial interests of the games, according to a new report published by Dutch architecture, research and urbanism studio XML to coincide with the London 2012 Olympics. 

Speaking to Dezeen about their new book, entitled Olympic Cities, Max Cohen de Lara and David Mulder of XML said it is harder for strong democracies to host the Games because the decision-making process takes longer and the public can be “uncomfortable with the idea of all the privileges” that organisers receive. ”It could be possible that the Olympic Games will only take place in upcoming, non-democratic countries who simply have the centralised power and money to organise them, but that would very much distance the Olympic Games from how it started.”

The authors say there is a cyclical nature to the Olympics, with their significance changing roughly every 20 years, and claim the Games are currently in a commercialised “franchise” stage after the near-bankruptcy of host city Montreal in 1976 forced the model to change.

However, they warn that the current status of the Games as a televised ‘mega-event’ should not provide strategies for future Olympic bids as we could be approaching another significant shift in attitude: ”The business model of the Olympic Games is 50% based on income from television, and obviously what television is will very much change over the coming 20 years.”

Commenting on the legacies left behind by the Olympics over the years, they said: “Inevitably, the enormous scale of the Olympics as mega-event forces any aspiring host city to think about its post-Games legacy. London’s candidacy was built around the promise of uplifting East London. In reality, however, the dominant commercial interests of the IOC and its sponsors make you wonder really how social the Games even can be in its current form.”

Their report was commissioned by the Dutch Goverment ahead of its bid for the 2028 Games.

See all our stories about the London 2012 Olympics »

Here’s some more from XML:

Currently the Games – just like any other global brand – are a strongly centralised project in every respect. Its sources of revenue are closely linked to the current model of the mega-event and the model of the entertainment industry, in which control over images (eg. television) and exclusive space (eg. Disneyland) are decisive factors. The IOC requires that host countries implement far-reaching legislative measures to protect the interests of official IOC sponsors, and legal exemptions are expected in numerous other areas.

It is particularly difficult for democratic countries, such as the Netherlands, to harness sufficient support for these legal exemptions and the allocation of vast (public) funds to host the Olympic Games. The recent Italian withdrawal of Rome as applicant city for the Games of 2020 also shows that it is becoming difficult for European countries currently undergoing austerity measures to sustain the balance between large scale investments and maintaining public support for such a mega-event.

Without change, the IOC runs a risk that the Olympics can only be organised long-term by centrally controlled countries with impetuous economic growth. The question is how this will relate on a long-term to the ideals of Olympism and thus to the credibility of the Olympic Movement.

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London designers Rizon have created a series of unofficial posters for businesses to sidestep strict marketing rules that prevent them publicising their involvement in the London 2012 Olympics.

Their Underground Supporter posters can be downloaded here and are designed to avoid infringing the guidelines published by Olympic organisers LOCOG.

“Working in the field of licensing and merchandising, the draconian way LOCOG has enforced the brand rules around small and medium enterprises wanting to show their support of the games has incensed us,” says Rizon’s managing director Dave Collins. “Total control for sponsors is not the Olympic spirit and certainly not in the spirit of British fair play.”

He thinks LOCOG cold have generated revenue by creating a discrete official program called the ‘official supporters program’. For a small fee businesses would be able to download a pack of approved marketing materials allowing them to demonstrate their support for the games.

New London Architecture chair Peter Murray wore a T-shirt listing all the architects and engineers involved in London 2012 but unable to promote their contribution at yesterday’s Creative Industries Summit and made the design available to download via Dezeen Wire.

See all our stories about London 2012 »

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