Edgy and Cool is Neither Edgy Nor Cool

There are many things in life that can be improved by a touch of sleek and shiny design every now and again. Cars, kitchens, the public image of the Royal family. Of all the things that can be made better by some minimalist edgy ingenuity, mascots for sporting events ain’t one of them.

And with that in mind, allow me to introduce our Olympic mascots.

(I didn’t make up the description tags. They’re actually what the designers were thinking)

What the bad-design-bollocking hell are these things? I’m pretty sure these are what the T-1000 would turn into if it needed to get a job entertaining children at birthday parties. This whole thing reeks of design decisions by some executive who thinks that kids don’t like fun anymore.

You know who I feel the most sorry for when I look ant these? The artist. Chances are they walked into the marketing meeting with two cartoon critter character designs in hand, beaming with pride at their creations and upon seeing them, all the marketing team could muster was “I’m not sure it’s going to appeal to our desired demographic.” Then the marketing team will have sent the artist away with the phrases “Blue sky thinking, out of the box ideas and synergizing” in mind.

About 50 design meetings later in which the artist, gradually losing faith in humanity desperately trys to keep some form of sanity in the design while the marketing team giving the minimum required input to earn their pay-cheques, we end up with these things. Some kind of bizarre cross between a Beholder and an Ipod nano. And you just know that in one of those meetings, one of the marketing trolls used the sentence “well, mouths aren’t really cool, are they?”

In attempting to appeal to the hip, young, trendy, twats of today the design team has completely missed the idea behind a mascot. They’re not meant to be all edgy (figuratively or literally), they’re meant to be fun. Silly, over-the-top, giant monkey dancing to YMCA fun!

Do you know what England’s usual pair of mascots are? A lion and a dragon. A bastard lion and dragon! How are these two discarded lumps of petrified metallic pretention better then a lion and a dragon?…… for that matter, how is anything better than a lion and a dragon? Imagine all the amazing things they could have dreamt up with a jumping off point like that? Someone could have even pitched the totally superballs idea of a lion riding a dragon. That would have overshadowed the entire god-damn Olympics!
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Just sayin’. This could have been a reality.

See you next week!