Tokyo 2020
I’m going to be honest. I didn’t like the final logo at first. I don’t know if I like the final logo even now, as olympic athletes compete with each other in Tokyo, as seventeen year old Lydia Jacoby, fresh out of high school, wins the gold for the USA.
The final four candidates for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics logo.
Logo A: the winning logo. Harmonized checkered emblem. Inspired by Ichimatsu Moyo, checkered indigo textile design. By Asao Tokolo.
Logo B: Connecting Circle, Expanding Harmony, by Kozue Kuno
Logo C: Surpassing One’s Personal Best, by Takaaki Goto
Logo D: Flowering of Emotions, by Chie Fujii
Side note, I’m absolutely stunned by Lydia’s performance. I saw a tweet that there’s apparently only one olympic sized swimming pool in her home state of Alaska, and I’m proud of that kid for being as awesome as she is.
Anyway, it’s taking me a lot of time to warm up to the logo. Originally, I had seen Daren Newman’s version of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics logo and I had fallen in love with it. It was clever and witty, after all.
Daren Newman’s take on the Tokyo Olympics logo. Highly stylized letterforms turn the number 2 into parts of olympic rings, while the number 0 is stylized into a perfect circle. The red olympic ring is a filled in red circle, referencing the red circle in the Japanese flag.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and I became a virtual hermit to anything news related, Olympics included, for about a year.
Fast forward to today, I’m watching the Olympics on TV, and I decide to look up the logo again, and am greeted by a circle of checkered squares. Or chequered, if you want to spell it the British way.
I thought it was plain at first. Boring, even. I sat at my laptop, brows knit, scrolling at the other finalists’ logos. Why didn’t they go with something more colorful?
It wasn’t until I dug a little more did I realize the cultural significance between the indigo squares. How the indigo represents an elegance you don’t really find elsewhere, and how it calls back to traditional textile design.
(Did you know? According to sixth-generation indigo farmer, Osamu Nii: “The indigo-dyed cloth seemed to be good for wounds because it protected [the samurai] and prevented bacteria.” [source] Not sure if this is the same indigo used in aforementioned textile design, but I was finally beginning to understand its significance in Japanese culture.)
And after even more digging, I began to understand why the other finalists weren’t chosen. Simply put, it can’t really be applied to any other medium, not easily or beautifully.
Either a mockup or actual photo of souvenirs from this year’s Olympics. The checkered pattern lays out beautifully on a porcelain plate, and the entire emblem is displayed on various other goodies, such as keychains, buttons, pins, a travel mug, and what I assuem to be a towel.
Frankly, I’m not sure what these are, besides boxes and tubes with the checkered pattern on it, but it looks damn good. This is what I mean by being applied to other mediums.
It was the above photos from My F Opinion’s blog post that changed my mind about the logo. After seeing these photos, I knew that you couldn’t really use the other finalists’ emblems in other mediums nearly as beautifully. As much as I love an insane amount of color, and as graceful as the morning glory inspired emblem is, you can’t easily apply that logo to any form you want.
That sort of logo demands a very specific color of background, demands to be used in very specific settings, and ultimately can be fussy to apply to other forms.
So we go back to the most minimalist of logos, the checkered pattern logo. We go back to minimalist Japanese design, and we go back to tradition to find our logo. That’s why the checkered design was chosen. There’s beauty in simplicity, and the final Tokyo 2020 logo exemplifies that.