Utah’s 2034 Olympics has a new — and controversial — logo

Francisco Kjolseth // The Salt Lake Tribune

Utah’s 2034 Olympics has a new — and controversial — logo

On a Monday, Gov. Spencer Cox stood in front of a crowd at the Salt Lake International Airport as Olympic officials unveiled both the official name and the transitional logo for the 2034 Winter Games. By Tuesday morning, the governor was standing in front of a room full of reporters and joking that the Utah 2034 logo had already fulfilled its purpose.

“It’s really brought people together,” he said, “because everyone seems to not like it.”

The logo has been controversial at best, widely panned at worst. It’s designed with a blocky font that mimics shapes found in Utah’s landscape — the most obvious of which is the “A” that replicates the contour of Delicate Arch. Commenters on social media sites and news articles have quipped it’s the same font used in CAPTCHAs or their fourth-grade book reports. Others complain it’s ugly or simply difficult to read.

To which its designers say: Try looking at it through a different pair of eyes.

The creators of the Utah 2034 transitional logo conferred with athletes with vision disabilities to, they say, make it as impactful as possible for as many people as possible in as many places as possible. They’ve created a piece that they say reflects the local Olympic and Paralympic committee’s whole-state approach to the 2034 Winter Games. And, they’ve done it all while working within the strict parameters set by the International Olympic Committee for transitional logos — which, in and of themselves, are fairly new.

Plus, noted Nate Morley, the lead designer, it’s art. It’s meant to be provocative.

“Art is subjective. And some people like things, and some people don’t like things. And that’s totally to be expected, and we certainly appreciate that,” Morley, a Utahn whose company, Works Collective, also designed the LA28 Olympic logo, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “I think the intent is to learn kind of why the logo looks the way it looks — what it’s meant to represent — and build that.”

The shape inside the zero, for instance, is evocative of a pictograph, according to a website local Olympic organizers launched to explain the controversial wordmark. The curves of the number two mimic those of a winding mountain road. When stacked, its letters and numbers form a checkerboard pattern reminiscent of Utah’s street grids.

Yet the design goes even deeper than that, said Danelle Umstead, an athlete with low vision.

“Every Olympic logo gets backlash,” Umstead, a four-time Paralympian, said in a text. “People forget that logos aren’t created to be trendy — they’re designed to be recognizable for decades, across stadiums, uniforms, merchandise, tiny smartphone screens, and global broadcasts.

“A lot of the early criticism focused on aesthetics alone, without understanding that accessibility was part of the design story.”

And that is a process into which Umstead has special insight.

Meant to be seen

As a decorated Paralympic skier, Umstead has sat through more than a few logo reveals. They can be more difficult for the Park City athlete to navigate than the alpine ski courses she races with the guidance of her husband. While the crowd around her cheers, she said she’s often scrambling to pull segments of a logo up on her phone using “extreme zoom technology.”

“The world is celebrating, and I’m thinking, ‘Hang on — give me five more seconds so I can see it, too,’” Umstead said.

That’s why she said it meant so much to her when Creative Director Molly Mazzolini consulted with Umstead and four other athletes with vision disabilities on the design.

Umstead, who also competed on “Dancing with the Stars,” is legally blind from retinitis pigmentosa. Though she does have some sight, she said most logos, with their thin swoops or indeterminate colors, are lost on her.

“I ski 70 mph down a mountain, no problem,” she said. “But if you put a low-contrast logo on a website, that’s where I wipe out.”

Conversely, a unique logo with thick lines, a sans-serif font and high-contrast colors stands out. That’s not the case just for people like her, Umstead said, but for everyone.

“If I don’t have to squint, zoom, and pray to read your logo,” she said, “that’s good design.”

Mazzolini and local Olympic organizers introduced the new logo in black and white — which has the highest contrast — as a nod to the Paralympians. She noted, however, that colors can and will be added to the design, depending on where and how it will be used.

In some instances, the name of the host city — Provo or Salt Lake City, for example — will appear beneath the wordmark as well. Mazzolini said she can also see the design of the characters morphing to fit a certain sport or locale.

Francisco Kjolseth // The Salt Lake Tribune

“I think it’s something that is all a possibility, because this transition logo process is so new within the Olympic space,” said Mazzolini, the founder of the Utah design firm Infinite Scale. “And I think we also need to think about it from the perspective of, it has a lot of growing to do.”

That growth will be closely regulated by the IOC.

Staying within the guidelines

It’s not like Mazzolini and her design team had a blank canvas when, last December, they began to imagine the kind of logo they would want to stand as the symbol of the Utah 2034 Olympics at least until 2029. (After which, Utah will have permission to begin soliciting sponsors and will be able to reveal its official mascots, symbols and logo).

The IOC had set strict parameters for the transitional logo — or, more accurately, the wordmark. Per the IOC guidelines, “These official marks are limited to typography — without symbols or icons — reserving the full creative expression for the official Games emblem released closer to the Games.”

But the restrictions don’t end there.

The logo had to be rectangular and match the height and width of the Olympic rings. It could be a maximum of two lines, but the IOC prefers it be one. When the Olympic rings and the Paralympic Ajitos are used, the IOC has dictated that the size of the rings must be “no larger than [one-third] of Y where Y is the total surface defined by drawing a rectangle around the Olympic rings, the Games signature, the designation and the Agitos (excluding the divider lines).”

It’s no wonder that the two other Games that have adopted transitional logos — The French Alps 2030 and Brisbane 2032 — went with a simple, bolded font.

“They just communicate a place. They’re not trying to evoke any story or emotion,” Morley said. “So I just give a lot of credit to the organization for looking for ways to sort of tap into the passion of the people of Utah and their excitement for the games.”

With that as his charge, Morley found some inspiration, and some wiggle room, within those restrictions.

Picking a font

The IOC guidelines may not allow the use of symbols in transitional logos, but they do explicitly permit the host to choose the font. So he began playing with creating a font that evoked landscapes found in Utah, from tip to tail.

Delicate Arch as the “A” was an easy choice. For other characters, he drew inspiration from a collection of photographs, from city streets to the bobsled track to mountain peaks. Some were aerial views, others were closely cropped to focus on a particular bend or squiggle.

“The intent was not to necessarily represent any one feature literally in the letter forms,” Morley said, “but to have the totality of the letter forms feel like they were evocative of the totality of all the topography and all the features of the state.”

Morley said he submitted several options to the Utah 2034 design team. The one picked was no doubt among the most audacious. So it was no surprise to him that it also provoked a strong response.

“People care a lot about their community. They care a lot about the culture that they’re part of. They care a lot about sports. They care a lot about the Olympics, whether it’s far away or whether it’s in their hometown,” he said. “A brand like this sits at sort of the epicenter of all those things coming together.”

Letting 2002’s logo ‘live within itself’

The same can be said for the 2002 Winter Games. That logo, a stylized, colorful snowflake dubbed the “Crystal,” is beloved by many Utahns but more widely is generally considered simply serviceable. Milton Glaser, the designer of the I (heart) NY logo, in 2022 rated it a 70 out of 100 — far from the highest among Olympic logos but tied for best for all of the Winter Games since.

Mazzolini worked in design during the 2002 Olympics, helping sponsors use that logo and the Olympic rings in their ad campaigns. For the 2034 Games, she said, the design team wanted to give a nod to the 2002 brand while allowing it to “live within itself.”

The transitional logo does that, she said.

“That bold choice does provide a strong legacy for us,” she said, “as well as gives us the runway to continue to tell the story.”

As for the backlash — which included members of the public posting their own, often AI-generated, alternatives — she said that’s a common part of the design process. And while she didn’t go so far as to say there is no such thing as bad publicity, she did note that the logo was viewed more than 600,000 times between Facebook and Instagram in the first 48 hours after its airport unveiling.

Members of the Utah 2034 executive committee also stood by their choice, for now.

During a media scrum last week, following the monthly steering committee meeting, Utah 2034 CEO Brad Wilson and president Fraser Bullock said they don’t expect the logo to change much in the next three or four years. After that, though, they aren’t making any guarantees.

Next time a Utah governor unveils an Olympic logo, it just might be a little less bold.

“2029 or 2030 will be a different process,” Wilson said. “And this will be a good platform for us to move from and work from and learn from.”

This story was produced by The Salt Lake Tribune and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.