Your Logo Here

In this consumerist society of ours, it’s impossible to escape the overwhelming presence of logos. Their ubiquity forms a sort of wallpaper, with countless brands plastered across the daily landscape competing for our attention. A good logo not only stands apart from that crowd; it also effectively represents, in graphic form, the essential elements of a brand. It’s the brand’s flag, capturing all the feelings and experiences that a company or organization bundles together to form its persona.

This month we will be inundated with logos, and none will be more prominent than the official logo for the 2010 Winter Games. Olympic logos are particularly tricky to get right, as they need to acknowledge the robust history of all previous Games, transmit something unique and fresh about the host city, take advantage of all the personal experiences and memories of a wide array of audiences, and, most awfully, be approved by enough committees to make even the most hardened bureaucrat shiver. Olympic logos face a high degree of scrutiny and are often held up for derision. Vancouver’s experience has been no different.

• More: All the Summer Olympic Logos
  
• More: All the Winter Olympic Logos

We all heard the mumbly grumbly when our 2010 logo was first unveiled back in April 2005. Among the complaints raised, the most resonant for me was that there are no Inuit here, so why choose the Inukshuk (or, to be more precise, an inunnguaq, the Inukshuk’s personified form). Instead of this northern symbol – a cairn, representing a human figure, used by the arctic peoples to navigate and mark special places – why not use a symbol that means something to our own First Nations people? Or something that means something to all British Columbians? Surely we could have found a symbol that had its roots here, where the Olympics are actually being staged.