When Wolff Olins released its identity design for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympic Games, the public reaction was definitely not what the team expected. From a Design Week article: “[W]ithin half an hour, its website crashed. It was just the start of a backlash so extreme that some of its designers had to be rehoused.”
A decade past the controversy, Wolff Olins designers look back at what actually happened. Was it the simply the start of endless social media griping, or was the dissension a moment in time where the general public really started to understand the significance of branding?