It isn’t a particularly difficult job to mock the official mascots of the London Olympics, so I’m not going to. I think you can probably do that yourself if you go and have a look at them:
http://www.london2012.com/mascots
I wonder how London has managed to get it so awfully wrong with the design for the Olympics? The logo looks like a throwback to a 1980s band logo, and these new mascots just look ridiculous. For a city with some sense of style, or at least pretentions to stylishness, it really is an extraordinary failure.
I had arrived at the conclusion that it must be Seb Coe’s fault, as the whole thing does smack of an aged Tory trying to reach out to ‘the kids’ and to be ‘cool’, but then I tried to think of the decals and mascots for previous events, and in fact with few exceptions the Olympics and World Cup throws up crap time and again. The exceptions that I can think of (and all is, of course, subjective) are Ole from the 1982 World Cup, and Ciao, the 1990 mascot, who was basically just a stick man.
Are sport and good design mutually exclusive?
Categories: Uncategorized
No More Workhorse 
Is it the stylized 2012 logo thing? you wouldn’t have a notion what it was meant to be. i think they’re trying to make it look like a little stick figure or something, but it does look quite rubbish!
The strange eye-ball creatures are more what i expected. While being quite naff, they’re the norm for such things.
Thats truly terrible. They should of just let Zippy from Rainbow be the mascot.
Yeah, the 2012 thing is truly awful, complete muck really, can’t believe that they paid someone to do it. As for the mascots, I’m starting to think that Avid Merrion should be the mascot for all events, he has just the right face for it.
I’m annoyed that the naffness is the norm – why should it be? That’s a terrible status quo. I actualy on some level just object to them having a mascot – why do you need that sort of crap at all? I suppose I’d accept Zig and Zag, or you go the other route and have something that looks like a horse knob or something, which would at least be funny. Well, -ish.
Otl Aicher is generally held up as the high-water mark for Olympic design:
http://www.1972municholympics.co.uk/
As for “why mascots”, the simple answer is: they’re a money factory.
Hats off to Otl Aicher, that is nice stuff.
I’m not convinced on the financial worth of mascots, though I guess they form a part of the package of stuff that sponsors are given to distribute, so they generate cash indirectly. I wouldn’t mind if they were well designed, but they really aren’t. A shame.