The 72 Munich Olympics Identity by Otl Aicher

The first 50 years of the 20th Century had given Germany a pretty bad name in the international community. The visual identity for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games was seen as a way to once again show the best of German culture.

The offi­cial 72 Munich motto, “the Happy Games” showed they were ready to show the world more VW Beetle and less Gestapo. The iden­tity was an opus for designer Otl Aicher in its own right. In the con­text of its goal; to show a demo­c­ra­tic and opti­mistic Ger­many to the world, it rivals the Bejing Bird’s Nest for the finest exam­ple of what Olympic design can be. Aicher’s abil­ity to use con­cept, type, grid, and illus­tra­tion to convey, a coun­try that is modern, bight, and dis­tinctly German is remark­able. He also expands the con­cept of an Olympic iden­tity, push­ing colors, fonts and themes to ticket design, maps, lug­gage tags, and even cig­a­rette lighters. It’s all amaz­ing today, I can only imag­ine how it looked to fresh eyes in 1972.

Trag­i­cally, the remark­able expe­ri­ence Ger­many worked so hard to present was crushed by the kidnap and killing of 11 Israeli ath­letes by Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ists in the second week of the games. To this day, the men­tion of Munich alludes to the mas­sacre, not the peace and good will every­one was enjoy­ing for a week and a half.

Even in the face of a tragedy like this, 35 years later its won­der­ful to focus on the pos­i­tives of the 1972 games: The aspi­ra­tions of a great nation using design at its finest to make the world a better place. A fan­tas­tic col­lec­tion of work from the games can be seen (and pur­chased) at the 1972 Munich Olympics Online Museum. After about an hour of drool­ing, I grabs a few of my favorites and added them below.

Thanks to the design blog ISO50 for bring­ing this to my attention.

» See even more Otl Aicher work on Flickr