Respected design­ers Armin from Speak Up and Bryan from Coudal actu­ally defend the London Olympic 2012 brand­ing. They list a num­ber of reas­ons, but they all boil down to one thing: The world hates it, but at least it’s ori­ginal! Thing is, not only is the logo hor­rible and the brand­ing just plain wrong for the games, it’s not even close to being original.

Take the ‘innov­at­ive’ epi­lepsy indu­cing new-look brand­ing film (I’m not kid­ding about the epi­lepsy attacks, beware!). Is it really that innov­at­ive? Hmmmmmm. Let’s have a look.

Graphics flow­ing through a city all squiggly-like has been done in a num­ber of ads and music videos, includ­ing “Shitty Bum by C-mon & Kypski” (2004 or earlier, by the way). Okay, so that part isn’t original.

What about the psy­che­delic col­our changes? Overused through­out the eighties, the best known example prob­ably being the MTV Launch video (1981).

However, there’s a quote in the aforlinked BBC art­icle which makes me believe it’s not all bad:

“The logo came up on TV and I was think­ing about the 2012 Games and then I was out,” said [Christopher Filmer, who needed to go to hos­pital after a seisure].

Because thank good­ness, at least it’s on message.