Bengaluru: When Tokyo was picked as the 1964 Olympic host city, there was a tiny hurdle. Language. Japanese was largely unintelligible to most outside the country. It was the first time that the Games were being held in Asia. The need to communicate with international visitors who would pour into the Japanese capital city led to the first systematic use of visual, wordless icons at the Olympics – sports pictograms.

A team of designers led by Masaru Katsumi and graphic designer Yoshiro Yamashita conceived 20 symbols to convey each sport – minimalist, and showing human forms in motion, playing each sport. The idea of a picture-based language is argued to have drawn inspiration from the symbol-based Japanese Kanji writing system. In a nod to their legacy, the 2020 Tokyo Games opening ceremony had performers dressed in blue and white outfits acting out the pictogram sequence through dance and music.

In addition to the pictograms, Tokyo 1964 also came up with 39 general information pictograms. The signage used in public spaces today, such as those for men’s and women’s toilets, have their origin in those Games.

Sports pictograms though have since evolved and taken on a life of their own.

The pictograms we see being used at the Paris Games are a stark departure from the previous ones. The 62 pictograms of the Olympic and Paralympic Games are intricate, complex, and move away from serving as ‘mere visual aids to striking coats of arms that serve as rallying cries for sports fans’, according to the organisers.

While the designs are distinctive, stylish and push the envelope on innovation, not everyone’s a fan.

“Design for sports is like no other kind of design — we start with the fact that sports fans are the most ardent brand loyalists on earth. Our work as sports designers is scaled up to mammoth proportions — it also needs to succeed in applications as small as a social media avatar. It’s applied to motion graphics, it’s rendered in a staggering variety of mediums, and so much of it is attached to actual human beings who are out there doing remarkable things — while creating memories that are sometimes discussed for generations,” says New York based graphic designer Todd Radom, who has three decades of working with professional sports leagues on him.

“Simplicity, in my opinion, is key. Distilling the human form down to a series of recognisable shapes for this exercise serves as a great example of one of the core tenets of design —combining form and function. The 2024 pictograms really are a series of complex illustrations, embellished with a ton of extraneous details. We’ve got an abundance of repeated shapes, implied motion lines, and all sorts of detailed renderings of sporting equipment. Some contain a great deal of contrast while others don’t. This approach makes for a disjointed total package, in my opinion.”

The Paris pictograms appear to have been built around the field of play and equipment of each sport – two barbells to depict weightlifting, riding helmets that also resemble a horse’s head; what’s missing strikingly is the human form — the athlete.

The brains behind the 1972 Munich Games, German designer Olt Aicher — who was also coming up with the directional signage at the Frankfurt airport at the same time — is often credited for reinventing pictogram designs through a series of silhouettes, constructed on angles of 45 degrees or 90 degrees, which have served as the template for later pictograms.

“As a university design student, I remember discovering and loving the Olympic pictograms used in the ’72 Olympics in Munich,” says Bill Frederick, another graphic designer from New York who’s worked with the NHL. “To me, the ability to communicate so many different sports through simplistic graphics of athletes was magnificent. It seemed as fundamental as cave drawings that used few lines to describe an animal. While I fully appreciate the concept and craft of the ones being used in Paris, I feel that the tradition of the pictograms has been lost to a decorative approach.

“For me, creating pictograms using graphic sports equipment misses the essence of the athletes that make the Olympics so special – it is truly a celebration of the very limits of our human bodies and spirit. The human aspect has always been core to pictograms and our love for them. I hope to see them return again at the 2028 Games.”

While the Paris pictograms carry symmetry and plenty of cool quotient, functionality appears to have suffered. It can be hard to tell which sports are depicted since the designs are complicated.

“My opinion might be biased because I am a fan of Aicher who designed the 1972 pictograms,” says Prof. GV Sreekumar of the Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. “There are too many things happening in the Paris Olympics pictograms, they’ve probably taken some inspiration from Cubism, and the cultural elements incorporated in them appear to be distracting. Of course, there is a drastic change in the audience of 1972 and 2024. Now a spectator can find the venue of a sport using a smartphone.

“Then the question arises: Do we stick to simple visual forms which represent a sport or can we explore this “coat of arms”? It is debatable. As a designer, I believe that a pictogram should make life easier for the user and communicate the idea with maximum clarity.”

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