London Olympics logo… WTF?

I’ve waited a bit before posting about the London Olympics logo, just wanted to see how other designers and also a wider audience would react to it. My first impression was also so bad that I didn’t want to post about it at all. Sometimes I have bad opinion on a logo, but get appreciate it with time, but here, well, I can’t get used to it. The shapes are too badly proportionned, the typography used for the city name is just awful and probably not usable in small versions, the chosen colors are terrible,…

Many other designers seem to have a bad opinion on this logo:
London 2012 olympic logo disaster
The 2012 Olympic Logo Ate My Hamster (I love that headline)
London 2012 Olympics Branding
Straight through the bottom of the barrel

Still, the logo was discussed all over the world, which is a marketing success for some I guess. I think that the initial idea was pretty good, trying to get away from the over-corporate logo. But this should have been the designer’s first sketches, not the final result. I am very disappointed.

Finally, the other positive aspect about that logo (or brand as they call it) is that it gave birth to a lot of very funny comments, like this one found on Simon Kitson’s website about the accompanying brand film.

I was waiting for MC Hammer to pop up somewhere.