Guidelines and standards for visual design
The Games of the XX Olympiad Munich 1972.

This design concept set new standards for branding and corporate identity: to get in the mood for the Otl Aicher Year 2022, we recommend the first reprint of his manual for the 1972 Olympic Games.

Just under a quarter of a century after the end of National Socialism, Otl Aicher was commissioned to design the "cheerful" 1972 Munich Olympics. He went about his work systematically and scientifically, freeing visual communication from national pathos and reducing it to the essentials in the spirit of the Bauhaus: use. The manual, completed in 1967, is an astonishingly manageable set of rules, a flexible system of colors, shapes and type that allowed Aicher's team and partners to "play freely" and saved "unnecessary preliminary work and time-consuming detailed decisions."

Aicher had a comprehensive claim: Everything should be able to be designed. With the results from over 100 design areas, he succeeded in creating an extraordinarily broad impact of the appearance and also set new standards in corporate design. To this day, Munich 1972 is considered the most successful design project of all the Olympic Games.

Published by Niggli Verlag, 78 Euro