Olympic Games: The Design

Is there a bigger challenge for a designer than the creation of an identity for the Olympic Games? Each venue must have its own unique image that merges national spirit and international trends with the Olympic values of friendship, solidarity, and fairness.

This title provides an in-depth overview of the history of the Games, centering visual design aspects for the first time: logos, mascots, medals, pictograms, uniforms, tickets, luggage tags, posters, souvenirs, and much more. Markus Osterwalder presents approximately 6,000 illustrations on over 1,500 pages in two volumes, coming in a slipcase, with fifty-eight chapters that detail astonishing facts and stories about who created what and how. Three foldout sheets give an overview on key design topics from the birth of the Modern Games to the present. For each of the Games, the passionate Swiss collector has chosen comprehensive examples from all desigin fields that enable viewers and readers to fully grasp the design identity of the respective Games. In addition, this title also highlights extraordinarily exciting developments in the field of corporate identity and brand design. Markus Osterwalder, Secretary General of the International Society of Olympic Historians, has one of the biggest Olympic ollections worldwide and is a renowned expert in the field. A graphic designer, Osterwalder has been devoted to the visual history of the Olympic Games for almost thirty years. He started to collect everything from and about the Olympic Games when he attended his first Games in Lillehammer 1994. Recently, he curated the exhibition "Olympic Langauage--Exploring the Look of the Games" at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.