Beijing, Moving Ahead.

A week ago, only a few had seen the 2008 Beijing Olympics logo. Well, all of that changed on Friday evening. Since I started watching the Olympics, I've seen the logo everywhere, which made me curious, what's it all about?

I went online and found the previous Olympic logos and to be honest, the Atlanta, Sydney and Athens logos are really quite simple and obvious, almost too obvious. So I took another look at the Beijing logo and began to analyze it.

The first thing that jumps out is the figure. I assume it's running and not dancing. It's running in a left to right direction which typically means looking ahead. Another thing is that it's drawn in clean, smooth, straight lines, not a brush like you'd expect. This speaks to modernism. To contrast this modernism, they drew the text under the logo in thick brush strokes to give that eastern feel. The other interesting aspect is the red. Red and black always look good, but in this case it was done deliberately because red is the prevalent color in the communist Chinese flag.

An additional interesting aspect is that the figure looks like traditional Chinese character. I had to go online to find out the back story. Apparently the logo is called "Chinese Seal - Dancing Beijing" which alludes to three Chinese characters: ren, person; wen, culture; and jing, capital city. I find that absolutely amazing, what depth! I had heard that the Chinese have thousands of characters in their alphabet compared to our measly twenty-six.

"I will use the word 'simple'- in that it works well in all the different ways it needs to work - small occasion, big occasion, internationally, nationally," said Copeland, the IOC Look of the Games advisor.

"In a word, it conveys simple but important concepts. It will take its place in Olympic logos, a prominent place," he added.

This is just another example of how the Chinese have taken the extra step to blow us away. We all saw the opening ceremony, it was big. Seeing that ceremony, the Chinese athletes so focused on obtaining the gold, and this logo I am now positive that China has an impressive culture. It doesn't matter if you agree with it or not, their culture has a way of bringing the people together to create excellence.

While I was surfing the web and trying to understand this logo better I ran across a controversial video that shows another side to this logo.



I touched on it earlier, the red speaks to communism and when I think of Chinese communism I have to think of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Is it fair to take what happened then, throw it into the faces of the Chinese people? People that so desperately want to be recognized as a proud and strong country in the international community? Isn't that what the Germans tried to do with the 1972 Munich Olympics? I don't know, but as well done as the video is I think this video is crude and probably unfair.

One thing can not be disputed, the Chinese have a devotion to excellence, we could learn something from that.

UPDATE 08.15: While watching the Olympics on NBC last night they showed a brief segment about the artist, Han Meilin, who designed the 2008 Beijing Olympic Logo.

A very soft spoken man who explained though his interpreter how he got the job and created the logo. He explained that during his stint in prison he delved into the Chinese alphabet so as to understand the relationship between Chinese words and images. He began to understand the long and complicated path from a drawing of a turtle to the written symbol of a turtle and how they can mean many other words. This knowledge made him an ideal candidate to design the Beijing Olympic Logo. During the interview he showed the original logo drew by the Olympic committee which apparently meant "Beijing". Then he showed his original sketches of how he was he was able to add more depth by incorporating the words of "person" and "culture" into the logo. Not only did he design the logo, he also designed the FUWA. The Official Mascots of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, see below.