Agency: ICON (Formerly Iconologic)
During my tenure at Iconologic, I had the great privilege to create the Look of the Games for the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games. It was a design system that would be applied to tens of thousands of surfaces: sports venues, banners, medals, the field of play, The Olympic Torch Relay, way-finding signage, merchandise, and much more. Central to the Look of the Games were the Sport Pictograms that I created to reflect the Italian traditions of high-fashion and sleek, modern industrial design.
Our team decided that the best metaphor to evoke the spirit of Olympism in Italy was the piazza—the open squares found in any Italian city or village, where people gather for conviviality with their neighbors. In this sense, an Olympic Games is like a piazza—bringing the world together for 16 days of friendship and sport. The piazzas in Turin are surrounded by many miles of arched walkways, so the arch became the key symbol around which I built the design system.
This project garnered a great deal of press, and was the cover story for both Communication Arts and Auburn Alumni Magazine. And—bucket list item checked—two of my posters are housed in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.