(DESIGN)
(FOCUS)
(OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES) (VANCOUVER 2010)
(DESIGN CHALLENGE)
(AVOID TRADITIONAL STEREOTYPES)
(AND REDEFINE THE NEW CANADA ON AN INTERNATIONAL STAGE)
(KNOWN FOR A LOCALLY INSPIRED SEA-TO-SKY COLOUR PALETTE)
(TRANSFORMATIONAL DESIGN ELEMENTS)
(AND ORGANIC NATURAL CURVES)
(DESIGN FOCUS)
When the athlete walks onto the field of play
you want them to feel like they've arrived
at the Olympic Games, and the look of the Games
communicates that.
For Vancouver 2010 it was all about trying
to define a new Canada.
You know, I think on an international stage,
there's very much, for better or worse, a kind of
stereotype of Canadians as lumberjacks,
as beaver pelts slinging, you know,
like we just drink maple syrup
and, I mean, we do, but we wanted to redefine
what the new Canada was.
So, for us the colour palette reflected that rather than
the traditional colours that you'd associate
with Canada, with red and white.
It was six designers who were pretty young,
including myself, we'd never built anything
anywhere near this scope.
Early on we were really trying to hard to show
ourselves off as being modern and progressive,
but in so doing I think things were starting to feel
a little cold and the opposite of what we were trying
to say about our country's national character, being warm.
It kind of came to a little bit of a head for us
when we took a field trip in North Vancouver.
We were all taking photos of textures around us,
and being a coastal city there's a remarkable amount
of different weather patterns that hit us at all times.
There's kind of this constant, what we ended up
calling, transformation.
And we just felt like that's Vancouver and that is Canada.
This is a place where everything's
constantly changing.
So, we started to hand draw a lot and to work with curves
and that ended up being, if you look at anything
whether it was the podiums, the torch, the medals,
they had curves and lines that connect back
to the idea of the sea and mountains that surround us.
Working from those foundational colours
we really then began to add a lot more element into it.
There was these layers of texture and then there's
these little, what Leo our design director called, spice,
where there's icons from around Vancouver
that are kind of transforming into a bizarre thing.
There is that dragonfly in the flow plane,
that combination of nature and technology coming together.
That look and that feel was the result of six or seven
minds just kind of coming together and building on top of
each other, and for better, for worse
that's kind of what it looks like.
We were always inspired by the athletes,
I think we made a real point of thinking about them
every time we went to design something.
Hopefully if we do our job right we will inspire
the athletes to try to achieve their best.
We want it to be memorable, we want you to be able to
close your eyes and remember what Vancouver looked like.
Even if you can't remember the details, just the colour
or generally how it made you feel.
When design works, it makes you feel, it creates
an emotional connection, and ultimately that's our goal.
There is absolutely something about when the torch
really arrives, everything just ignites full force.
Before I went to the Calgary '88 Games,
my brother and sister and I used to run fake torch relays
around our block in Kelowna, a small town
in British Columbia here.
So, even before I went to the Olympic Games I had this
magic sense of the torch relay, and so when I became
a lead designer on the torch relay, and the torch,
that was definitely a time and a moment where I felt like,
"Yeah, this is, I've arrived."
So, the torch relay identity is where we started.
Ultimately it came out one evening when Leo,
the design director and myself were staying late
at the office, jamming through these different
sketches and different explorations.
I had one where there was this white pathway that had
our sea-to-sky colours on either side.
And I had this flame coming off the top as if it was a flame
at the end of this snow-covered pathway.
And Leo said, "Well, what if this pathway was curved?"
And so it became a pathway with a flame at the end of it,
but it also became a torch as well,
a silhouette of a white torch.
And so, when we went to brief the industrial designers
we were collaborating with, Bombardier,
we had this foundation in place.
One of the things that we loved was the Lillehammer
torch had this flag flame where the flame exit hole
is more vertical, I thought, "Wow, isn't that beautiful
"when the torch is lit and there's a runner?"
Our design director Leo would always bring us back
to the DNA of the identity that we had created.
I can remember him talking about the bottom of the torch,
he was saying, "This should feel like a Canadian ore
"that's been worn down over time,
"like the bottom of a canoe oar"
and you can see the bottom of the torch,
it's not a straight cut, so we looked at how we can
bring the dynamic expression
that was in our identity system,
how could we bring this into a dimensional form?
We wanted people to feel like it was a piece
of the new Canada, of the new voice, of the new generation.
We knew it had to help inspire, hopefully a nation.
It's less about the thing, it's more about
what that points towards.
What does a torch point towards? It points towards
the Olympic Games.
What do the Games point towards?
For a lot of us, it's about doing our very best
at whatever we do.
It was probably the greatest feeling of my life
when I was randomly selected out of 1,600 employees
to be one of the torch-bearers.
Leo had come up to me and he put his hand on my shoulder,
and in his Spanish accent, he said, "Congratulations,
"you deserve this more than anyone," and I said,
"Thank you."
And that was the last time I ever spoke to him.
We unfortunately lost Leo just months before the Games,
very unexpectedly and tragically,
and that was the biggest blow
and test of our emotions and ability to keep going on.
It was unimaginable, to be honest, but we also obviously
felt "We have to finish this job for him,"
at the level of perfection that he demanded of everything,
which was very high, and try to be inspired by
what he had brought to the project.
Leo was a great leader because he was passionate,
he had the energy, but most importantly he was a friend.
You know, on a human level,
design is about human connections,
it's about human connections with your audience
it's about human connections as a design team,
and Leo was more of a friend than a boss,
and I think that's what allowed our team to be successful,
was that we had that camaraderie.
And his passion and his determination for excellence
was contagious, like, it's not about a meal voucher,
this has to be the best meal voucher we can make it.
And that is something I've carried with me in my life,
It's not about just running the torch, it's everything
around you, you have one moment, you have one chance,
you have to make the most of it, so for me
running that torch was all about
running the torch with Leo.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét