Investigation: Key Points
- Appropriateness of branding & identity of olympic games
- the growing importance of branding as it became more than a sporting event
- the clear portrayal of culture, politics, history etc of the host nation
Problem:
- Designing for an international audience presents a whole range of issues
- sensitivities; social, cultural, political, historical etc
- design/ imagery/ message can be accepted by one audience but may be rejected by another
- problems with appropriateness of design
Solution:
- Produce a piece of design/ campaign, product that both carries the intended message and is also internationally appropriate and accepted
- culture neutral design
- can this be achieved ? answered through practical investigation
- combining culture with design culture
Olympic Games rebrand
- My essay focused on the branding and identity of the Modern Day Olympic Games.
- And so an obvious practical response would be to produce something related to the Games
- Tokyo are the next hosts in 2020
- The branding of the up coming games has received a very mixed response
- Idea - to rebrand the 2020 Tokyo Games informed by research from essay
- The Olympic Games presents a whole range of different design aspects including posters, logos, signage, way finding etc
- I could either cover a number of these platforms, or be more specific and focus on just one
- When talking through my ideas, it was said that one issue with this would be the sheer size of the target audience
- In order for my own designs to have more of a direction, I should specify the target audience to make it smaller - This smaller audience would then help to inform the design decisions
- I have noticed that, as part of the 2020 campaign, they are aiming to use well known anime characters as the faces of the games
- These characters will be used in the posters, adverts, animations etc
- This is because they are aiming to attract a younger Japanese/international audience
- Anime is a very big part of Japanese culture and although cartoons are mainly aimed at young people, it is still widely used across Japan in advertising and packaging
- I could build on this use of anime characters in a number of different ways
- Producing a series of posters where the characters are performing different olympic sports
- this may seem childish to the rest of the world
- this could be aimed at younger population whilst main branding stays age neutral
- Alternatively, I could redesign the official logo as the existing one needs more work
- The designs would aim to appeal to an international audience, but maybe focusing on one age bracket
- I think that focusing on the olympics would link my practical work with my essay a lot stronger than if i were to design for something different
- I will be coming up with a range of responses to this problem
Alternative Ideas
- Instead of focusing on olympics, I could use my research into design meant for a global audience and apply this to the design of something completely different
- This could include designing packaging for a product that is sold all over the world
- This packaging would be informed by being completely culturally neutral
