Logo branded for life

Every Olympics has a new emblem, and every emblem causes outrage, none more so than 2012’s jagged shards, says Richard Fitzpatrick

THE logo for the London 2012 Olympics was unveiled on Jun 4, 2007. It was like a bomb going off. On the streets and on web forums, there were hackneyed critiques (the kind voiced every time an Olympic logo is unfurled) — that its jagged representation of the year ‘2012’, with Olympic rings embedded in the zero, could have been cobbled together by a child.

But the vitriolic nature of the criticism caught the Olympic Committee off-guard.