45 Olympic Logos and Symbols From 1924 to 2022
Last week I visited my friend in South Korea and I couldn’t help but notice PyeongChang 2018 symbols all over the place. This made me look into history of Olympic logos and the oldest I could find was dated back to 1924. Well, I didn’t spend too much time Googling older ones, so if you find any other logo, please let me know and will add it to the list.
I did notice that Sochi has the first logo that features domain extensions in it (Sochi.ru). Most likely we will see similar trends in the upcoming years. I was surprised that some of those logos use flat design which became popular only few years ago. Hopefully no one will ever come up with logo that features barcode or some other useless “innovation”. Olympics logos must be kept clean and easy to remember and so far each country has done an amazing job with it.
Here goes the entire Olympic logo collectio from 1924 to 2022. Which one is your favorite logo and which one is the worst?
Update (1): You might also want to look into Olympic poster collection.
Update (2): Added Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic logo/symbol
Update (3): Added Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic logo.
Update (4): Replaced Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic emblem.
Paris – Summer Olympics 1924
Lake Placid – Winter Olympics 1932
Los Angeles – Summer Olympics 1932
Garmisch-Partenkirchen – Winter Olympics 1936
Berlin – Summer Olympics 1936
St. Moritz – Winter Olympics 1948
London – Summer Olympics 1948
Oslo – Winter Olympics 1952
Helsinki – Summer Olympics 1952
Cortina d’Ampezzo – Winter Olympics 1956
Melbourne and Stockholm – Summer Olympics 1956
Squaw Valley, California – Winter 1960
Rome – Summer Olympics 1960
Innsbruck – Winter Olympics 1964
Tokyo – Summer Olympics 1964
Grenoble – Winter Olympics 1968
Mexico – Summer 1968
Sapporo – Winter 1972
Munich – Summer 1972
Innsbruck – Winter 1976
Montreal – Summer 1976
Lake Placid – Winter 1980
Moscow – Summer 1980
Sarajevo – Winter 1984
Los Angeles – Summer 1984
Calgary – Winter 1988
Seoul – Summer 1988
Albertville – Winter 1992
Barcelona – Summer 1992
Lillehammer – Winter 1994
Atlanta – Summer 1996
Nagano – Winter 1998
Sydney – Summer 2000
Salt Lake City – Winter 2002
Athens – Summer 2004
Torino – Winter 2006
Beijing – Summer 2008
Vancouver – Winter 2010
London – Summer 2012
Sochi – Winter Olympics 2014
Rio – Summer 2016
PyeongChang – Winter 2018
Tokyo – Summer 2020
Beijing – Winter Olympics 2022
This Post Has 23 Comments
The Rio 2016 is impressive. Got my attention.
same here
Like Rio as well. Not a big fan of Pyeong Chang however.
Rio 2016 looks like a buttplug to me. It should not look like a buttplug
People see what they are looking for I suppose.
And you know this, because ?
Very possibly the coolest one, yes.
Some of these are fake, they’re digital recreations. I have a hard believing the Montreal 1976 logo used Arial before it was available. Someone cut some corners.
It is digitally recreated but it is fairly accurate. Here you can see gallery from original: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yearofthesheep/5004729762/in/photostream/
Thanks for the link. I don’t think Arial and Univers are ever the same typeface. Plus if you look at the graphic standards you’ll see the “recreator” didn’t get the relative widths of the symbol and “Montréal 1976” right either. There are far too many computer artists/designers and companies blatantly ripping off other designers’ work without permission, usually very poorly because they are not being fairly paid, and the example here is at that level. Did anyone think to ask the Olympics organization themselves if they had a scan of the real thing? That would solve many problems.
Gonna have to echo Font Geek’s concerns here. “Fairly accurate” doesn’t really cut it, unfortunately, from an editorial standpoint. For one, most of these are clearly live-traced (from what source, who knows). Every pixel and ever nanometer counts with branding – colors, typeface, kerning, curves – the whole thing. And if we can’t be sure any of these are the actual official logos (which they certainly don’t seem to be), then it casts huge doubt over veracity of this exercise and not much can be drawn from this collection. This may sound nit picky, but it is in fact, quite serious. In this case, with the permission of this website, it appears that FastCoDesign syndicated this collection in an article and apparently failed to CQ on their end as well. So, sorry for being a downer, but I really think this article should have a more explicit statement about the provenance of the graphics collected here, because as it is, it is terribly misleading.
I don’t discount the importance of maintaining accuracy, but I think for the most part people who came to this site probably did so from a search engine and a search similar to “Olympic Logos” or something similar. They just wanted to know what the logos looked like. I doubt they have to be flawlessly perfect to the last atom. I just wanted to know what the logos looked like in general. You would recognize any of these logos as the logos of each Olympics. It was informative, which was the main point of the article. You got information you needed.
The real font was Univers. Amateurs have imitated the real design — and shit happened.
Helvetica, not Arial. Helvetica is the (un)official font for the City of Montreal — used on all their signage.
all of olympic medals for 100 years http://graph.factum.pro/olympicmedals/ (ru)
Hi,
a quick scan delivered this: the Olympics of 1920 in Antwerp:
http://home.scarlet.be/~fhermans/antwerpen1920/impact.html
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympische_Zomerspelen_1920
No nice logos at that time, but a beautiful poster!
Thank you for pointing that out!
I am already working on Olympic poster collection and it will be available tomorrow morning. And I have Antwerp Olympics included: https://colorlib.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/02/1920-Antwerp-Summer-Olympic-Games-Poster-2.jpg
Stay tuned for more! 😉
Interesting how the Barcelona logo became a template for so many summer (and some winter) games to follow.
Lots of issues around the 2020 emblem but in my opinion, it is better than 2012’s logo.
Wonderful. I. I waiting for Rio 2k16
Sheen,
Rio Olympics 2016 are right around the corner but we have already listed their logo. We have wen as far as listing logo for Olympics 2022.
Personally, I prefer the RIO Olympic logo 🤗
Unfortunately all of these logos are incorrect. They are close to the originals, but do not have authentic type, colors, and lines. The 1936 logo isn’t even the right logo at all!
Hulse and Durrell, the designers who did Vancouver 2010 actually were later hired to create an Olympic heritage collection with the authentic logos and branding for all of the games: http://hulsedurrell.com/project/heritage-collection
Hope this helps anyone looking for accuracy and you should add a note to this article saying these scans are inaccurate.