G'on, punch me

Who’d want the task of designing an Olympics typeface and logo when the design critic of the International Herald Tribune likened the preceding logo to ‘dad dancing’ and the London ‘12 typeface, was assessed to be, “surely the worst new public typeface of the last 100 years” by The Guardian journalist, Simon Garfield?

Dalton Maag, the office of Swiss typographer, Bruno Maag has risen to the challenge and/or thrown caution to the wind (depending on how your gung ho meter swings).

The Rio ’16 typeface is seen as an about face for Olympic type design. The 5,448 character brush script is organic, joyful and expressive - according to Kelsey Campbell Dollaghan, the designer illustrator ex-editor of Architizer – compared to London’s jagged, dissonant and tightly wound script.

Ironically, Maag is known as the Angry Man of Type, perhaps because of his unbridled and uncensored loathing of helvetica. He tends to rail, too, against his peers for failing to take risks. Campbell-Dollaghan describes the newly revealed type thus, “As a whole, the script is an unpretentious and sweet complement to Tatíl’s swooping Rio '16 logo design.”

So far, so good. No doubt, we will hear much about what the rest of the world’s critics think before the other Games begin.

Rio 2016 logo for Tatil Design from Rodrigo Sampaio on Vimeo.