Paris's less than Perfect Pictograms

Olympic flame or hairdressing salon?

As we approach the Paris Olympics,  we thought we'd return to a subject we last poked at a few years ago .. Olympic pictograms. Our look at all the archery pictograms from the 1988 Seoul Olympics till Tokyo can be found in this article if you are interested. So to recap, what is a pictogram?

Pictograms are icons created as a way to easily communicate without written language. They should be simple, easily recognizable and clearly impart their information without words. Pictograms first appeared at the Olympics in the 1964 Tokyo games and have been a staple every since. They are ideal at international events like the Olympics for letting guests know things without using words as not everyone will speak the host nations language or English, assuming they treat it as a lingua franca.

Now in the past all Olympic pictograms have featured a tiny little stylised dude doing his sport. They can be understood in a matter of seconds and don't need any explanation or thought. The French, being French, decided to break with tradition for Paris 2024, be all creative and go in another direction. They certainly created something unique and in keeping with the flavour of the Paris games. However, it looks like they over egged the pudding in the design process and failed to achieve what they set out to do .. to easily communicate without written language.

The Paris Games visionaries created a complicated iconography that does not convey information instantly and the problem gets worse the smaller or further away the pictogram is because details in this design are important. There are no tiny fencing, boating or running dudes. Instead each sports symbol is made up of sporting equipment, as well as utilizing the sports pitch, marked field or court as a design element. The image is finished off with one or two lines of reflected symmetry. The final design looks like stylized coats of arms and can take you a couple of minutes to work out what you are looking at assuming its big enough for you to see the key details. Which brings us to the archery pictogram .. That's it on the left.

Tokyo 2020 Archer

Well .. it does convey archery we guess. There's a face and four basic bow/arrow shapes but if your brain isn't tuned to the shapes of archery, does that instantly leap off the poster or building or app? We're not sure .. and this is one of the better ones. When compared to the Tokyo pictogram to the right (criticized as boring and uninspired by professional designers) .. the coat of arms is really struggling to quickly convey the information people need.

Creative types seem to like the design philosophy expressing their view that the images are very striking, and claim they do achieve what the organisers aimed for. Quotes like "It's refreshing to see a move away from the typical stick man used in sports icons all over the world." get rolled out in the media. Parallels to sport logos or club badges giving "identity to the events rather than a mere visual aid" are drawn. However, the internet is pretty clear its confused, with people mocking some of the more bizarre pictograms and making up new sports they represent.

Here are four of the most mocked Paris pictograms on Reddit.

From left to right .. space origami, flower arranging, band aid application and finally trivial pursuit for cool dudes and dudettes. Guesses as to what sports they actually represent? Feel free to have a go.

Being different always gets you noticed but when you bury your intended message in uniqueness, you're trading clarity for confusion. Apparently this is common when a brand or IP breaks the mold expected by their customers. Paris certainly broke the pictogram mold ... but they may have gone too far in pursuit of a style and methodology. Los Angeles 2028 will be interesting to see if Paris ended the stickman trend, at least for a while, or we quickly return to tiny dudes doing stuff.

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Actual Olympic sports represented by the pictograms are climbing, surfing, skateboarding and goalball from the para-Olympics
All the pictograms can be found on the Paris 2024 Pictogram site