LA28 unveils floral-inspired visual identity for 2028 Olympics
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The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is set to host the opening and closing ceremonies as well as the athletics competitions at the Olympic Games in 2028.
PHOTO: REUTERS
LOS ANGELES – Organisers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games unveiled the event’s official visual identity on March 23, a floral-themed design system meant to reflect the city’s landscape, neighbourhoods and cultural character.
The branding will appear across competition venues, fan areas, citywide installations, signage, digital platforms and broadcast presentations during the Games, LA28 said.
At the centre of the design is the “Superbloom”, a reference to the bursts of wildflowers that can blanket parts of Southern California after periods of rain.
“It was a great turning point for us when we developed this colour palette,” Geoff Engelhardt, LA28 head of brand design, told reporters on a call.
“It’s high-energy, optimistic and, most importantly, welcoming. We are welcoming the world in 2028 to the biggest and greatest party it has ever seen.”
The core graphic is built around 13 individual blooms, which organisers said represent different elements of Los Angeles, from its entertainment culture to its neighbourhoods, people and native landscape.
The colour palette draws on the bird of paradise, the official flower of Los Angeles, and is grouped into four families – poppy, scarlet flax, bluebell and sagebrush – to evoke the region’s terrain and vegetation.
“We’re inviting the world to this space and the colours that we pulled from our beautiful official flower of the city reflect that,” said Ric Edwards, LA28 vice-president of brand design and executive design director.
“We’ve got 40-plus venues that we need to design and these colours transmit different moods. We’re going to use that to tell our overall story.”
He added: “Athletes train their entire lives for a moment on the greatest stage in sports. When the conditions are right, everything comes together and something extraordinary happens. That feeling of anticipation, energy and the culmination of the many moments that led them here is what inspired our Look Of The Games.”
Organisers also said the typographic style was inspired by Los Angeles street signage, including strip mall and hand-painted shopfront lettering, in an effort to give the identity a distinctly local feel.
LA28 said the design was developed to work across a wide range of settings, from nearly century-old venues to new facilities, while also accounting for broadcast requirements, digital formats and lighting conditions. The organising committee partnered with design studio Koto on the project.
The identity was unveiled more than two years before the Olympic opening ceremony in what organisers described as an unusually early roll-out, allowing partners and stakeholders more time to incorporate the branding into their materials.
The colour palette will extend to merchandise for the Games.
“This is just the first step,” Engelhardt said. “We’re going to take this look, our colours, our type system and our blooms and start building an amazing licensing offering for all fans and athletes to take pride in.”
Licensing partners like Nike and Ralph Lauren will follow LA28’s design lead, Edwards added.
Los Angeles will host the Olympics for a third time in 2028, after staging the Games in 1932 and 1984. It will also host the Paralympics for the first time. REUTERS
