Tokyo 2020 Olympics
Earlier this year, I combined three of my passions: Japanese culture, graphic design and the Olympic games. This project was a visual exploration for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games, which includes a custom typeface for the Japanese characters and numbers, and bespoke illustrative elements which accompany the artwork throughout.
I had two core objectives for this design project:
- The art style had to be colourful and vibrant - the Olympic games are fun, exciting and dynamic and so too, then, did the visual styling have to be.
- The layout needed to be elegant and entertaining. Often, one of these characters is sacrificed for the other when it comes to design but the Olympic games is the most grand demonstration of sporting skill and technique so my execution was deliberately graceful, but retains unpredictability and motion.
東京オリンピック2020 - Tokyo Olympics, 2020
自信 - Confidence (Jishin)
The typeface I created is bold, solid and uniform which felt like a strong reflection of the nature of each of the Olympic sports, but also its structure was an intentional nod to modern Japanese design. Japanese characters often have many strokes which became a challenging barrier as I explored the execution of this typeface. Ultimately, identifying a system of rules for how certain types of strokes interact or neighbour eachother became the required solution.
東京オリンピック2020 - Tokyo Olympics, 2020
The flowing, illustrative elements to the designs are customised patterns made of rectangular fragments. These coalesce to form an expressive unit of motion. The patterns composition is in reference to the structure of the Japanese Tokyo 2020 logo to allow the overall design to become an extension of the pre-existing work, and not ignorant of it.
The motion of the pattern is fluttering, liberated and organic. In sports, visual motifs typically only show forward acceleration, but much of the Olympics has a much more complex rhythm; from gymnastics, to athletics, to dressage or water sports, movement is far more unbounding than forwards alone.
競技大会 | 三十二 - Games of the Olympiad (Kyōgi Taikai 32)
To push the idea of motion further, imagery of competitors was used to instil energy and nostalgia of previous Olympic games. It was an important consideration to use a range of nationalities, and not exclusively Japanese contestants because, whilst the wording is in Japanese, the games are global.
がんばろう - Good luck (Ganbarou)
チームスピリット - Team Spirit (Chīmusupiritto)