The 1968 Olympics Identity Was Drawn From Five Rings and a Folk Pattern

Lance Wyman was a 28-year-old American graphic designer at the New York firm of George Nelson when, in November 1966, he flew to Mexico City for an international competition to design the visual identity of the upcoming Olympic Games. He had two collaborators, the British designer Peter Murdoch and the Mexican architect Eduardo Terrazas. They worked out of a borrowed apartment for four days and presented one idea: take the five interlocking circles of the Olympic logo and treat them as the start of a continuous calligraphic line. Extend the strokes outward and the line traces the numerals 6 and 8. Place the word MEXICO in front of the digits and the whole logotype falls naturally out of the same geometry — a stack of parallel curved bands that referred at once to the Olympic rings, to Op art, and to the patterning of pre-Columbian Huichol weavings.

The logo won. Wyman then did something most identity programs do not do: he kept extruding it. Every letter of the Latin alphabet was redrawn in the same multi-stroke style; the result was a complete display typeface that no one else could use without looking like a 1968 Mexico Olympics knock-off. Stadium signs, ticket art, transit maps, hotel banners and city wayfinding all ran through the same visual filter.

The team also faced the practical problem that signs needed to read in Spanish, French, and English. Wyman's solution was a set of pictograms, one for each of the 19 sports — a person mid-dive, a fencer's mask, a horse's silhouette — drawn in the same heavy stroke as the typeface. They prefigured the now-universal language of airport icons.

The design historian Philip Meggs, in his standard A History of Graphic Design, called the Mexico 68 system "one of the most successful in the evolution of visual identification." Wyman's bands of curves still anchor every retrospective.