Munich 1972 Was Public Infrastructure

There is a poster from 1972 that is just a grid of small black squares on a silver-grey ground, each one holding a white figure doing something: throwing, swimming, climbing stairs, pushing a pram. Cooper Hewitt's record for it counts 169 squares covering twenty-one Olympic sports plus general communicative signs. The Smithsonian magazine account says the poster displayed 166 pictograms. I have not found a document that reconciles those two numbers, and the difference probably comes down to whether you count the squares or the figures in them. It is characteristic of this subject: almost everything about Otl Aicher's Munich programme is repeated confidently and documented loosely.

What is not in doubt is that the system worked, that it outlasted the event it was built for by more than half a century, and that a version of it is on the wall of every airport you have walked through. That is an unusual outcome, and the usual explanation for it is wrong in an interesting way.

The commission, and the manual

Aicher was appointed design commissioner for the Games of the XX Olympiad. The Stiftung Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm dates the appointment to 1967. Cooper Hewitt's object record gives the commission as 1966. Aicher's English Wikipedia entry has him directing the design from 1966 to 1972. The Internationales Design Zentrum Berlin says the design manual itself was finished in 1967. My best reading is that preliminary work began in 1966 and the formal role and the completed manual both belong to 1967, but I would not assert that as settled.

The framing came from Willi Daume, president of the organising committee, who originated the idea of Munich as "the cheerful Games". Aicher took that brief and made himself the person controlling how it looked across everything, which is the actual move that made the rest possible.

He ran a multinational team, Department XI, which included the graphic designers Ian McLaren and Michael Burke alongside illustrators and technical staff, producing the guidelines, the pictograms, signage, apparel and promotional material. The output was distributed across more than a hundred design areas.

The thing that makes Munich 1972 infrastructure rather than branding is the manual. It was reissued in facsimile by Niggli in 2019 as a 44-page document at 63 by 30 centimetres, in a binder and slipcase, in German, English, Spanish and French. The IDZ's description of its purpose is the clearest statement I have found of what Aicher was actually doing:

a flexible system of colors, forms and fonts that enabled Aicher's team and partners to "play freely" and saved "unnecessary preparatory work and time-consuming detailed decisions".

Saved unnecessary preparatory work and time-consuming detailed decisions. That is not the language of identity design. That is the language of an operations manager. A summer Games is a logistics programme in which tens of thousands of people produce printed and built artefacts simultaneously under deadline, most of them not designers and none of them able to telephone Aicher. The manual exists so that a signmaker in a stadium concourse and a printer producing tickets can make compatible decisions without coordinating.

The IDZ describes Aicher approaching the work "systematically and scientifically, freeing visual communication from national pathos and reducing it to the essentials in the spirit of the Bauhaus: use". The official site for his centenary describes his method as a kinship approach: variable elements rather than rigid uniformity, which requires strong direction, because, as that account puts it, a flexible system needs a director.

Signage surviving in the Munich Olympic park. Photograph by Henning Schlottmann, CC BY 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The colours, and what they were chosen against

The palette was seven colours plus white and silver. Light blue was the official colour of the Games, presented as standing for peace; other hues referenced the Bavarian Alps. The Smithsonian description of the family is light, fresh shades of blue, green, silver, orange and yellow. Aicher selected every hue himself, and the application drifted steadily towards a rainbow through the final months before the Games.

The exclusions are the design decision. Red, gold and black were kept out because of their association with the 1936 Berlin Games, and Munich's own traditional black and yellow was kept out too. The negative space of the brief is more legible than its content: a German state, twenty-seven years after the war, staging the first summer Olympics on German soil since the Games that Leni Riefenstahl filmed, and deciding at the level of the colour specification that nothing in the visual field would rhyme with that.

Aicher's own statement of the position exists in at least two English translations. The centenary site renders it: "There will be no demonstration of nationalism and no enormity of scale... Pathos will be avoided, as will ceremonial awe." Smithsonian renders the same thought as "There will be no displays of nationalism and no giantism." I have not seen the German original, so I would treat either as a paraphrase of a documented position rather than as a quotable sentence.

The pictograms are a typeface, not a set of drawings

The construction is the interesting part, and the museum record is more useful than the design-blog version. Cooper Hewitt describes the figures as built on orthographical and geometric coordinates, with rules and grids determining the proportions of heads, torsos and features. Smithsonian describes a grid laying out the figures along vertical and diagonal lines.

Ellen Lupton's formulation, quoted in that piece, is the one that explains the durability:

He really wanted to make it like an alphabet. It's like making a font, but it's a font of human body parts.

That is a different kind of object from a set of icons. A set of icons is a finite list; when you need a new activity you commission a new drawing and hope it matches. A construction system is generative. The figure reduces to a small set of parts, described in one account as a dot for a head and a rounded rectangle for a body, placed on vertical and diagonal lines, so that a competent person who has the rules can produce a new figure that belongs to the family without asking permission. The official pictogram site describes the identity as built from a modest number of straightforward universal elements of communication: colour, pictograms, typeface, format and design grid, combined into a standardised overall system delivering both flexibility and conclusiveness.

That is the property that made the system extensible for fifty years. There are now more than 750 Aicher pictograms covering wayfinding, sport, transport, healthcare and services, described by the licensor as the most comprehensive system of its kind. Almost all of those were made after 1972, and most were made after Aicher's death. The grammar outlived the author, which is what a grammar is for.

What actually travelled, and what did not

Here is the correction that matters most, because the claim it replaces is made constantly.

The pictograms on the toilet doors, escalators and baggage carousels of American airports are not Aicher's. They are the AIGA/DOT symbol signs, and their lineage is documented in detail. The United States Department of Transportation recognised that pictograms were being drawn ad hoc and commissioned the American Institute of Graphic Arts to produce a system. Roger Cook and Don Shanosky of Cook and Shanosky Associates did the design work, under an AIGA committee of five: Thomas Geismar, Seymour Chwast, Rudolph de Harak, John Lees and Massimo Vignelli. A first set of 34 symbols was published in 1974, and the DOT asked for 16 more in 1979, giving 50 in total. The set received one of the earliest Presidential Design Awards.

The team did survey what already existed. AIGA's own account says they compiled an inventory of symbol systems in use worldwide, from airports and railway stations to the Olympic Games. Wikipedia's article on the DOT pictograms names the sources examined, including Tokyo International Airport and the Olympic systems of Tokyo 1964, Mexico City 1968, Sapporo 1972 and Munich 1972, evaluated for legibility, international recognisability and resistance to vandalism.

So Munich is an input, not an ancestor. The relationship is influence and shared problem, not descent, and describing the DOT set as "based on Aicher" is wrong in a way that matters commercially, because of the second half of the story.

And Aicher did not invent the Olympic pictogram either. Masaru Katzumie and Yoshiro Yamashita pioneered the idea for Tokyo in 1964, producing 59 pictograms. Aicher built on that precedent; the official pictogram history names 1964, 1968 and 1972 together as the founding sequence. What Aicher added was the construction system, not the concept.

Two lineages, one free and one owned

The legal position of the two systems is the sharpest thing in this whole subject, and I have never seen it discussed in a design context.

ERCO's own press material states the position plainly: following Aicher's death in 1991, ERCO GmbH took over the worldwide sale and licensing of the pictogram system, and has since been responsible both for licensing and for the system's further development. It also notes that copyright protection extends beyond the individual pictograms to the underlying design system itself, which is a much stronger claim than protection of the drawings and is exactly the claim a generative system makes possible.

Aicher had worked for ERCO, the Lüdenscheid lighting manufacturer, for years before this; the pictogram work and the ERCO corporate identity are part of the same relationship. I have seen the year 1976 attached to an ERCO pictogram release, and the Museum Ulm holds an item catalogued as "Otl Aicher und Mitarbeiter, Erco, Piktogramme, 1976", but I have not been able to establish from a primary source what the 1976 arrangement actually was, nor to confirm a product or programme named "Coordinates" that is sometimes mentioned in connection with it. I am leaving that gap open rather than filling it.

The practical consequence is that the world ended up with two public sign languages of very different legal character. The one that became genuinely public infrastructure, in the sense that anyone can use it without permission, is the American one, produced by a government procurement process and placed in the public domain. The one with the better design system is private property and generates licence revenue for a lighting company. That is not a criticism of ERCO, which has maintained and extended the system for thirty-five years and had no obligation to do so. It is an observation that the word "universal" in design writing usually describes reach, and almost never describes access.

The shadow

None of this can be written as a straightforward success. On 5 September 1972, members of Black September took hostages in the Olympic Village. By the end of the failed rescue at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield in the early hours of 6 September, eleven members of the Israeli team were dead, along with a West German police officer, Anton Fliegerbauer, and five of the attackers. Competition was halted for thirty-four hours, the first suspension in modern Olympic history. A memorial service was held in the Olympic Stadium on 6 September before roughly 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes, and the IOC president Avery Brundage declared that "The Games must go on, and we must continue our efforts to keep them clean, pure and honest."

The design programme's whole premise was that a German Games could be visually disarmed: no nationalism, no monumentality, no pathos, security deliberately unobtrusive, everything light and cheerful in Bavarian alpine colours. That premise did not survive contact with the event, and the lightness of the visual system was part of why the security posture was what it was. This is not a design failure in the narrow sense, and the pictograms are not responsible for what happened. But a body of work that was explicitly built to change what a German public spectacle felt like cannot be evaluated purely on whether the signage was legible.

Cooper Hewitt's own article on the pictograms, incidentally, refers to "Berlin's Nazi-era 1932 Games"; a reader had to leave a comment correcting it to 1936. When a national design museum misdates the thing the entire design programme was constructed in opposition to, that tells you how much of this history circulates as received atmosphere rather than as fact.

What it teaches

The transferable lesson is not the colour palette or the diagonal figures. It is that Aicher treated a deadline-driven, multi-supplier production problem as a question of what rules would let strangers make compatible decisions independently, and then wrote those rules down in a form other people could actually use. The manual was finished five years before the event. Everything else follows from that ordering.

Glenn Adamson's summary, quoted in Smithsonian, is fair: "The universalism he had in his mind actually did become universal in terms of graphic design." It became universal because it was a grammar rather than a set of pictures, because a government on another continent independently needed the same thing two years later, and because a lighting company was willing to keep paying for its upkeep after the designer died. Three quite different mechanisms, only one of which is design.

Sources

• Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. "Faster, Higher, Stronger" (object record and description of the Munich 1972 pictogram poster: 169 squares, twenty-one sports, orthographical and geometric coordinates, commission dated 1966). cooperhewitt.org/2017/12/29/faster-higher-stronger/

• Gershon, Livia. "This Graphic Artist's Olympic Pictograms Changed Urban Design Forever." Smithsonian Magazine, 23 July 2021 (166 pictograms, the grid and diagonals, the colour family, Tokyo 1964 precedent with Masaru Katzumie and Yoshiro Yamashita and 59 pictograms, quotations from Ellen Lupton and Glenn Adamson). smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-graphic-artists-olympic-pictograms-changed-urban-design-forever-180978256/

• Internationales Design Zentrum Berlin. "The Rainbow Games", otl aicher 100 (Willi Daume and the cheerful Games, the seven colours plus white and silver, the exclusion of red, gold and black and of Munich's black and yellow, the kinship approach, Department XI with Ian McLaren and Michael Burke). www.otlaicher.de/en/articles/the-rainbow-games/

• Internationales Design Zentrum Berlin, Advent project. Entry on Aicher's 1972 guidelines (manual completed 1967; the flexible system of colours, shapes and type; more than 100 design areas; the quoted purpose of saving unnecessary preparatory work). idz.de/en/projects/idz_adventprojekt/geschenke5v24_otl1972.html

• Standards Manual. Record for the facsimile of Guidelines and Standards for the Visual Design: The Games of the XX Olympiad Munich 1972 (design completed 1967; reprint by Niggli, 2019; 44 pages; 63 by 30 cm; binder and slipcase; German, English, Spanish, French). standardsmanual.com/products/guidelines-and-standards-for-the-visual-design-the-games-of-the-xx-olympiad-munich-1972

• otl aicher pictograms. "History" and homepage (design commissioner role; colour, pictograms, typeface, format and design grid as the elements of the system; the 1964, 1968 and 1972 sequence; more than 750 pictograms across wayfinding, sport, transport, healthcare and services; licence by quotation). piktogramm.de/en/history and piktogramm.de/en/

• ERCO. "Pictograms: quickly comprehended, easily interpreted, immediately understood" (press release). States that following Aicher's death in 1991, ERCO GmbH took over worldwide sale and licensing of the pictogram system, and that copyright protection extends to the underlying design system. press.erco.com/en_us/press-release/company/pictograms-quickly-comprehended-easily-interpreted-immediately-understood_2403

• AIGA. "Symbol Signs" (34 symbols published 1974, 16 added 1979, 50 total; Roger Cook and Don Shanosky; committee of Thomas Geismar, Seymour Chwast, Rudolph de Harak, John Lees and Massimo Vignelli; inventory of existing systems; free distribution). aiga.org/resources/symbol-signs

• Wikipedia. "DOT pictograms" (DOT commission to AIGA; sources surveyed including Tokyo International Airport and the Tokyo 1964, Mexico City 1968, Sapporo 1972 and Munich 1972 Olympic systems; evaluation criteria; public domain status as works of the United States government). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_pictograms

• Wikipedia. "Otl Aicher" (born 13 May 1922, died 1 September 1991; directed the Munich Olympic design 1966 to 1972; earlier corporate work for Braun and Lufthansa; Rotis, 1988). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otl_Aicher

• Stiftung Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm. "History" (Aicher appointed design commissioner for the 1972 Games in 1967; the E5 group and the Lufthansa identity from 1962). hfg-ulm.de/en/hfg-ulm/history/

• Wikipedia. "Munich massacre" (5 to 6 September 1972; Black September; deaths of eleven Israeli team members and the West German police officer Anton Fliegerbauer; Fürstenfeldbruck; the 34-hour suspension; the memorial service of 6 September before about 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes; Avery Brundage's statement). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre

• Sessions College. "Iconic Icons: Aicher's Pictograms" (grid-based geometric construction; the figure described as a dot for a head and a rounded rectangle body; the 1970s Frankfurt airport wayfinding work). sessions.edu/notes-on-design/iconic-icons-aichers-pictograms/

• Museum Ulm. Catalogue entry "Otl Aicher und Mitarbeiter, Erco, Piktogramme, 1976" (exhibition otl aicher 100). museumulm.de/ausstellung/otl-aicher-100/anhang/otl-aicher-und-mitarbeiter-erco-piktogramme-1976-kai-alexander-gehrmann-berlin/

Related reading

• Muriel Cooper and Typography That Moves

• What a Grid Is Actually For

• How Brands Get Named

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