Otl Aicher Munich Olympics

Designing the 1972 Munich Olympics, designer Ian McLaren shares insight into working with Otl Aicher.

For the publicity they had to create:
 - 25 posters
 - The official guidebook
 - Technical documents
 - Daily programmes for each for the 21 days for each of the 14 sports
They all had to look related and be designed in the same style

The pictograms are seen as the most iconic thing to come from this olympics and were used frequently on merchandise but the emblem 'wreath of rays' was also used a lot too, all the souvenirs and products had to fit the guidelines set by Otl.

The whole process took 22 months

Past experience helped McLaren as he has previously worked with grids when designing a series of penguin book covers, he used them skills when making the technical documents.

The first poster for the olympics was made when nothing had even been built, the only visual they had was a model of what the stadium would look like.

The olympic events took place in multiple areas of Munich therefore has to be slightly adapted in order to work there.

For the colours Aicher didn't want to use the standard yellow and black of their flag in his design work therefore opted for blue white and green. He also developed a colour coding system which features light green for press, silver for protocol and orange for technology.

When working on the programmes there was sometimes only 11 hours through the night to create them. To overcome this they used print outs from journalists which featured the results in three different languages (german, english and french). They then organised groups of soldiers from the signals section of the military to cut these out and paste them up. Each cover used the specific pictogram which represented that specific sport.

Univers typeface was used throughout the publications as it is easy to read, has a wide set width and wasn't used much at the time.