Organisationskomitee für die Spiele der XX. Olympiade München 1972: Richtlinien und Normen für die visuelle Gestaltung
Cover and inside pages from Otl Aicher’s manual with guidelines and standards for the visual design for the Games of the XX Olympiad which took place in Munich, Germany in 1972. The design of this manual was finished in June 1969.
Otl Aicher’s cover as identity for the Olympics integrated his choice for colours, the sun emblem, the Univers typeface, as well as the all-known five-ring emblem designed for the Olympic Games. This design manual shows the use of colours, positioning of the logo, use of emblems, dimensions and paper formats, but also a full description of the official mascot, a dachshund named Waldi.
Why Aicher decided to use Univers for the Olympics is described in Markus Rathgeb’s publication:
Aicher’s central criterion for choosing a typeface was that it had to be modern. At that time Aicher regarded serif typefaces as old-fashioned. He probably considered several sans-serif typefaces, including Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica, and Univers. […] After Univers was used for Expo’67 in Montreal, where it gained international recognition, the Munich Olympics became the first large-scale project in Germany to apply the typeface exhaustively and exclusively. No other typeface was used for official communications for the Games, and Aicher made sure that the type for the Games was playful and understated rather than bold and overt.
(Extracted from: Rathgeb, Markus: Otl Aicher. London: Phaidon Press Limited 2006, p. 87–94).
A reprint of the design manual was published by Niggli in 2019.
1.1 The IOC Flag:
For Munich 1972 the different line widths of the rings create a balance between light (yellow), medium (blue, green, red) and dark (black) colours: the yellow ring has the thickest line, while the black has the slimmest.
4.1 Colours:
The colours of the visual identity have a regulatory and recognition function.
8.1 Print area ⅔ DIN A3:
All print areas are organised in the typographic Didot system.
10.2 Olympia Waldi: Design:
The official mascot is uniformly defined by its name: Olympia Waldi.
10.3 Olympia Waldi: Stripes and Colours:
Two other unalterable characteristics of the Olympia Waldi are the stripes and the colours.
10.4 Reproduction and printing:
The special Olympia colours, with CMYK printing and with-black-and-white printing.
2 Comments on “Organisationskomitee für die Spiele der XX. Olympiade München 1972: Richtlinien und Normen für die visuelle Gestaltung”
Phil Martin made a swash version of Univers 65 entitled Univers Flair.
Right on! We do have a few uses for the related Helvetica Flair already. Univers Flair now has a typeface page, too. Have you come across this face in the wild?