Rio Olympics Logo Of Contagious Energy

As the world knows over, the Rio Olympics 2016 has been underway for a week or so, and the competition has been largely a success so far. From dramatic sprints to nervous diving, elegant horse riding to blood, sweat and tears ruby tackling, Rio Olympics 2016 has so far lived up to the omnipresent Olympic Games hype. Prior to the games, you'd have only really seen the Olympics logo, and now the games are underway, such logo is adorned on every position possible throughout the grounds of the site. Fred Gelli created the identity for this year's summer games in Rio de Janeiro, and he described the task as "...the world's hardest graphic design challenge."

Following on from our earlier feature of the visual identity that is to be used for the Japanese Olympics in 2020 which came under much scrutiny, the Rio 2016 logo has had much more of a successful design period. Brazilian graphic designer Gelli describes his logo as "...three colourful figures holding hands and linking feet..." and is the "...first 3D logo in the history of the Olympics.

Requiring a logo that can be used across multi media and the hundreds of potential uses, "...it's considered the most complex visual identity in the world because it has to be printed on a pen and at the same time it has to dress the whole city," Gelli explains. Requiring to address twelve different attributes in the visual identity, from local culture to universal understanding, it is known that such a logo will be used on the busy streets of London (UK) as much as it will be on the outskirts of Shenzhen (China). Creating over 50 iterations of the Olympics logo, the preferred end result was produced as a three-dimensional digital model and was inspired by the shapes of Rio de Janeiro's mountains, for example Sugarloaf Mountain.

How is your nation doing? See the results online at Rio2016.com.

Photography credit : Rio 2016