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Where’s Wally? And where’s Lord Coe’s eye?

Wolff Olins is one of the best design agencies in the world. They are the people who created the phenomenon of Orange. They met the small team of enthusiasts and talked them out of naming their new company something insipid like Telefonia and turned the brightness of those people into a powerful and lasting identity.

Wally Olins's book On Brands is one of the most insightful and stimulating books about communication you could read.

So why, oh why has the company that bears his name produced such a disappointing logo for the 2012 London Olympics?

More than any national initiative since the Festival of Britain 50 years ago, the London Olympics can bring this whole country together in ways we can hardly imagine at the moment. There are plenty of critics of

The London Olympics logo has been released. patrick collister despairs over the missed opportunity

the whole jamboree, miseryguts who insist money would be better spent on the black pit that is the NHS. And this logo will simply give them more ammunition.

They'll say it cost a fortune and they'll be right. They'll say it's rubbish and they'll be right. And they'll say the explanations of what the logo is meant to symbolise are hogwash and... You get the picture. It looks like a couple of rhomboids bonking. But, hey, in a choice of colours.

We all marvelled at Seb Coe for winning the bid against the odds. One man with incredible passion and determination managed to build a team that shared his vision. Millions of us bought into it too. So where was his lordship's eye when it came to choosing the logo?

This has the horrible appearance of being designed by committee. Let's just hope the games themselves aren't such a mash-up.

FIRST POSTED JUNE 5, 2007