Olympic games and the arts enjoy a wonderful relationship. With their focus on excellence and achievement, it’s understandable that the spirit of the games includes an emphasis on artistic achievement.

Cities hosting the Olympics have had a long tradition of releasing posters as a way of creating excitement around the upcoming event. These have typically demonstrated pretty high standards of visual design. Below are three posters from past Olympic Games:

Unfortunately, the 2012 London Olympic posters are far removed from great design. The committee asked top artists to come up with designs, but gave them no framework within which to operate, perhaps believing that such a framework would restrict their creative freedom (it doesn’t). The result are posters that mostly fail to speak of athletics. We end up with a series of posters that have no concept behind them, no cohesion, and no Olympic branding whatsoever.

You can view the entire series on the BBC website, but here’s a look at some of them:

I fail to see how a series of horizontal lines relates in any way to the Olympic games. It doesn’t matter how the artist tries to justify his or her work. What matters in this type of communication is how the viewer perceives it.

The athletes involved in the games have worked tirelessly for years to give their very best effort in a world-class competition to see who comes out on top. These posters have absolutely nothing to do with athletic achievement, nor geography, nor competition. There is no sense of national diversity, no hint of athletic unity. Even more pathetic, there is no sense of brand cohesion.

This travesty is just another step in an increasingly dissonant Olympic communications program. First, we encountered the controversy of the logo design, a visual mess of sharply angled boxes that fails to convey anything related to the spirit of the games. The logo is about disarray and confusion, not a coming together of nations in a spirit of friendly competition.

Next came the mascot designs, featuring one-eyed metallic creatures that fail to speak of London nor of anything related to Olympic achievement.

Now we have a poster series which again fail to have any shared elements.

Where’s the brand?

An important aspect of all graphic design, art direction, branding or advertising is to create a cohesiveness that brings diverse elements of the message together, giving them a common focus. This becomes even more important when a design strategy calls for widely different ideas.

In our over-communicated world, strategy is vital. We are assaulted by a barrage of messages daily — some 4,000 different commercial messages every day — and have learned to tune out everything that isn’t relevant to our individual lives. As a result, even when messaging needs to be very different from piece to piece, there must be some underlying concept tying the parts together into a whole so that when we see them we put together the puzzle, as it were. We begin to understand the message being presented and enjoy the journey of discovery we go through in the process.

I’m not opposed to modern art or creativity. I’m not opposed to breaking the so-called “rules” in design. We need to do that sometimes. But I have failed to see anything approaching a concept in any of the 2012 Olympic branding or communications. It looks like the work of a committee without direction, a rudderless strategy without leadership. Instead of celebrating unity in the midst of diversity — the spirit of the games — what I’ve seen so far communicates only confusion and discord.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think.

What I particularly like is how the flow of it, despite being a single column, is organic. The eye keeps being surprised by new touches like a bar chart following a pie chart (as compared to two identical styles), images moving from one side to the other, icons like checkmarks next to bullet points and so on. Engaging enough that you want to read all the way down to the bottom. The colors are coordinated with those of the brand, and are always legible where they need to be.

Overall a good job. Here’s what it looks like:

Have you noticed how textures have become popular? We see this influence in the kind of papers used for brochures and packaging, to interior decorating trends, to the strong textures showing up in clothing styles. I believe this trend is directly related to the growth of Internet communications — a flat, untouchable medium that looks pretty but never offers any real tactile essence.

This isn’t the first time a communications trend has affected us culturally. The growth of television in the late 1950’s had a similar impact, though in those days it was checkered tablecloths, wrinkled chiffon dresses, silk shirts, and corduroy pants.

People have had enough experience with the internet and interactive presentations by now. The excitement that characterized the 90’s is fading. The internet is now an everyday tool. Meanwhile, people are getting tired of the pretty pictures behind glass. They are yearning to touch something real. They want to feel blind embossing and corrugated cardboard. They want to watch the shadows interplay from die-cut openings and edges. They want to run their fingers along unusual bindings and shapes of annual reports that look more like packaging than business documents.

Advertisers who wish to maximize the psychological impact of this trend should combine their internet strategy with extra effort on production of collateral materials. The most effective strategies will probably involve the use of highly tactile print communications combined with highly interactive and informative online communications. Especially if one requires or supports the other to complete the message.

Watch as social media continues the transition in our expectations. We now want our brands to interact with us, not to talk to us in a one-way message, but to demand a two-way dialog. Ignore these developments at your own peril.