I never noticed that. Now I can’t unsee.
Thanks for nothing, Boing Boing.
I like this. It is funny. Thanks.
Did Wolff Olins, the London 2012 Olympic logo designers make this too?
Edit: nope, the vagbutt is from DesignStudio. But they both have offices in London…not to cast wholesale aspersions on British aesthetics. (also fixed some typos, if you care)
I’m just amazed they haven’t changed the logo yet. I suppose it’s publicity for them.
Cast away. The British graphics media is run by dicks who employ dicks. I was hoping I would never see that eyesore again by the way, but you had to underline your point I suppose. Surprised not to see a string of goatse hidden in corporate logos images being posted here.
My apologies for hitting your trigger! 
That’s okay, but yes, it is a trigger, and here’s what the gun is loaded with: Ages ago Mark Frauenfelder did an article on here that referred to the Googie school of architecture and roadsigns. That same theme was evident in cars with sharkfin tail lights, in advertising typography with sweeping angular gestures, so on and so forth. The basic design template behind it is the irregular rhomboid. It could be said that in 1950’s Americana, we saw that in its purest form, and it was picked up by European graphic artists and employed beautifully by the likes of Meulen, Mariscal, Torres and many others in the 1980’s, and it experienced a sort of typographical and design renaissance of sorts in the media generally during that decade.
What gets to me about that Olympics design is that it is second-hand second-hand. It gives me the impression the approach was sourced from some misguided 1980’s retroism, yet without understanding the history of it, and at the same time trying to be hip-hop hip.
This isn’t just the creakings of some petrified purist here, I’ve enjoyed many works that have been an inchoate cross-referencing of unacknowledged historical influences, but they are rarely if ever expensively produced corporate iconography. (The UK taxpayer paid Wolff Olins £625, 000 for that thing, according to one source, I heard quotes for higher at the time). In this case it is made worse by the fact the whole Olympics campaign’s economic fallout has been horrific in the UK, and communities were broken up in its development, yet the propaganda, for which this logo was an ever-present focal point, hypocritically proclaimed the games to be “For the People”.
What’s even odder than the logo itself is what’s happening in this ad for a service to sublet out your apartment: The tenant is startled by an insistent knock on the door, which he opens only to be overrun by repeating hordes of sweaty renters with little apparent regard for personal space or the integrity of the property. It implies that if you rent to AirBnB visitors you’re likely to wind up with some Animal House / Bachelor Party type aftermath on your hands.
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