Otl Aicher

1. What it is — the official poster of the Munich 1972 Olympics, the first of a series of 21 posters; according to Wikipedia, it is precisely this one that became the general/official poster of the games.
2. Composition — a posterised/screened photograph of the Olympic Park (TV tower, the stretched tent-like roofs of the stadium, the lake) across the whole surface; top left the inscription "München", the Olympic rings and the dates "26.8.–10.9.", below them the "Strahlenkranz" emblem of the games — all small, all dominance running through the image, not the text.
3. Colour — an almost monochromatic blue scale (from dark blue to almost white) for sky and water, white for clouds/screen structure, a narrow band of light green for the lawn/stands — no red, no black as a flat colour.
4. Typography — Univers, small, in the upper band, entirely subordinate to the image.
5. Message — the three-second test: a cold, bright, technically optimistic place (tower, tents, water) without a single human figure, without a heroicised body — the opposite of the visual language of Berlin 1936.
6. Why exactly this way — Aicher's personal task for himself was to make a Germany that cannot be mistaken for 1936: no monumentality, no black-red-gold, no heroicised body. Posterising a photograph of architecture (not the body) in a cold blue scale directly carries out that task.
7. What would kill it — adding a human figure in the foreground, especially in motion or in a pose of strength — the poster would immediately move closer to the iconography it deliberately avoided.

Principles: paleta-po-iskljucenju To verify against the image: exact dimensions and print run of the first edition.

1. What it is — a reference sheet showing sets of uniforms for the Olympic staff, grouped into rows by colour/function; SFMOMA collection (the title of the sheet is not individually listed in the v1 harvest — see Notes on sources).
2. Composition — a grid of small photographed figurines in uniforms, each group in one colour (red, green, dark blue, orange, turquoise, yellow, neutral beige/grey), with accompanying text blocks beside each group (illegible at the available resolution).
3. Colour — seven to eight clearly separated flat colours, each consistently tied to one group/function of staff — colour here is NOT decoration but a functional marker.
4. Typography — to verify against the image (text illegible at the available resolution).
5. Message — the three-second test: a visitor who does not know German can still, by colour alone, guess which service the person they are looking at belongs to.
6. Why exactly this way — consistent with the whole philosophy of the programme: colour is not an aesthetic choice but part of the information system — the same palette that colours the signage and maps here directly encodes a human role on the ground.
7. What would kill it — assigning the same colour to two different functions (e.g. media and technical service) — the system stops being legible and the uniform becomes just clothing.

Principles: identitet-je-prirucnik To verify against the image: the exact title of the sheet and the naming of each function/colour — the text was not legible at the available resolution of the scan.

1. What it is — the orientation map "Strukturplan München 1972 — Situation der Wettkampfstätten" (layout of competition venues), SFMOMA collection.
2. Composition — an abstracted grid of the city's streets/roads in a white line on a beige ground; a blue band (the Isar river/canal) cuts diagonally across the whole composition; each competition venue is marked with a small black pictogram of the sport alongside the location name.
3. Colour — beige/sand ground, white road grid, one light blue band for the watercourse, black for text and pictograms — the same "few colours, methodically used" discipline as in the rest of the programme.
4. Typography — small, consistent grotesque (sans serif class; the specific typeface not confirmed from this image) for location names.
5. Message — the map does not show the city's topography for its own sake but purely for the visitor's orientation — everything not relevant to "how to get to the competition" is left out.
6. Why exactly this way — the same pictogram vocabulary used on signage and uniforms is here applied at the scale of the whole city — proof that the system was constructed to work at every scale, from the uniform to the urban map.
7. What would kill it — inserting realistic illustrations of buildings or tourist landmarks — the map would lose its informational clarity and become a tourist souvenir.

Principles: konstrukcija-je-prosiva To verify against the image: exact year of the first publication of the map (SFMOMA dates it provisionally to 1972).

1. What it is — construction diagram for an athletics/running pictogram, preparatory drawing (1971) before application to signage.
2. Composition — the runner figure built exclusively from straight lines under a fixed set of angles, over a full rhombic/triangular (45°) construction grid; the head is a separate circle, not joined to the body.
3. Colour — black and white, no grey tones.
4. Typography — not applicable.
5. Message — the diagram itself IS the message: not "here is a runner" but "here is the rule by which any athlete in motion is drawn".
6. Why exactly this way — constant stroke width, a fixed set of angles and a separate circular head form a grammar that can be applied to any sport, regardless of whether Aicher draws it himself or someone else on the team, a decade later — that is the reason the system could become the DOT pictograms at all in 1974, in the hands of a completely different team.
7. What would kill it — drawing a single figure "freehand", off the grid, even if more beautiful — the next draughtsman in line would have no rule to repeat and the system would collapse into a collection of individual illustrations.

Principles: konstrukcija-je-prosiva, gramatika-piktograma (local tag)

1. What it is — a series of information posters with the competition schedule by sport (e.g. handball), letterpress and drawing on newsprint, a team under Aicher's direction (PGDA credits only him, but describes the work as team-produced — see Notes on sources).
2. Composition — every poster in the same format: at the top the mark "München [rings] 1972", in the middle a row of sport pictograms, at the bottom a table of competition dates/times; eight posters visible in the photograph, each in a different colour.
3. Colour — yellow-orange, light blue, silver-grey, green, blue — each poster carries ONE colour from the official palette as the background of the entire sheet, not as an accent.
4. Typography — Univers (documented for the programme as a whole), tabular setting of date/time figures.
5. Message — a three-second test, even without reading the text: the colour of the sheet immediately says "this is the schedule for ONE sport/day", because the colour is not repeated randomly but consistently follows the category.
6. Why exactly this way — the same pictogram and the same palette seen on the poster, the uniform and the map here do the job of a timetable — proof that the "manual" covers even the driest, least glamorous application of the system.
7. What would kill it — printing all sheets in the same colour for the sake of "tidiness" — the system would lose the one function of colour (distinguishing categories at a distance).

Principles: identitet-je-prirucnik To verify against the image: exact schedule/sport on each individual sheet (only partially legible in the available photograph).

1. What it is — one of 21 posters in the sports series; PGDA lists a team of six named designers (Gerhard Joksch, Otl Aicher, Gabriele Pée, Nanke Claassen, György Nagy, Henri Wirthner) — team work under Aicher's direction of the programme, not his individual drawing (see Notes on sources). The same motif (football/soccer) is held in the SFMOMA collection under the title "Soccer poster, Sports Series", attributed solely to Aicher — v1 discrepancy in credit between the two sources noted, not resolved.
2. Composition — two footballers in a collision/struggle for the ball, framed tight, filling almost the entire surface; no background other than a flat colour.
3. Colour — posterisation (manual separation of tonal values from a photograph) in green, orange-yellow and blue-turquoise — the players' bodies reduced to flat polygons of colour, no black contour line, no grey.
4. Typography — to verify against the image (no text visible in the available frame).
5. Message — a three-second test: "a collision in sport" is recognised, but the bodies are so abstracted by the colour arrangement that no player is portrayed as an individual hero — it remains a pure general gesture of movement.
6. Why exactly this way — the same political discipline as in poster 01, applied to the human body: posterisation deliberately breaks the photographic realism of the body into abstract colour polygons, so that the athlete remains a gesture, not a heroised figure — a direct avoidance of the visual language of 1936, where the athletic body was the central propaganda motif.
7. What would kill it — retaining full photographic detail of the face and muscle definition — it would return exactly to the heroised iconography that the whole programme avoids.

Principles: paleta-po-iskljucenju To verify against the image: exact number and names of all six credited designers; the reason for the discrepancy in credit between PGDA (six names) and SFMOMA (Aicher only).

1. What it is — a photograph of an actually installed signage sheet with the swimming pictogram, still in place in the Olympic swimming hall; the photograph is from 2012 (Henning Schlottmann), the sheet itself from 1972.
2. Composition — a square sheet, the swimmer figure (arms extended forward into a dive) built with the same grammar as the runner (item 04) — straight lines, fixed angles, separate circular head, constant stroke width.
3. Colour — light blue background (the same "apolitical, colour of peace" from the official palette), white pictogram.
4. Typography — not applicable.
5. Message — a three-second test, from corridor distance: "swimming is here" is recognised without a single word of text, even under night lighting or a poor viewing angle (visible in the photograph itself, shot through the glass/roof structure).
6. Why exactly this way — this is exactly the test Aicher's principle demands: the system is tested on the ugliest, cheapest, least glamorous application (a signage sheet on a wall), not on a poster — and, fifty years later, the sheet is still in place and still legible.
7. What would kill it — printing the pictogram in several colours or with shading for the sake of "beauty" — at a distance and under poor light it would lose exactly the instant legibility it exists for.

Principles: konstrukcija-je-prosiva, gramatika-piktograma (local tag)

1. What it is — Aicher's own typeface family Rotis (1988), Semi Serif variant; the image is a contemporary (2010) reconstruction of the full character set, not a photograph of the original Adobe/URW catalogue.
2. Composition — not applicable in the usual sense; the subject of analysis is the letterforms, not the layout of a specimen sheet.
3. Colour — the contemporary specimen uses a green background for legibility; it is not part of the original catalogue appearance (to verify against the image if the original Adobe/URW specimen from 1988/89 is found).
4. Typography — Rotis was conceived as a "superfamily" of four related typefaces/cuts (Serif, Sans Serif, Semi Serif, Semi Sans) that share the same skeleton/proportions, so that they can be mixed without visual clash; Semi Serif is a hybrid in which some letters retain rudimentary serifs while others remain without them — the exact distribution of which letters keep the serif is not reliably legible in the available image (to verify against the image).
5. Message — the typeface family itself is a "programme" in the Gerstner sense: one set of rules (skeleton, proportions) generates four different registers (from strictly serif to strictly sans serif) that can be combined within the same document.
6. Why exactly this way — consistent with the whole career: even a single typeface Aicher builds as a system with rules for combination, not as one fixed cut — the same drive that ran the Olympic programme, applied to typography.
7. What would kill it — (not applicable to an individual work) — abandoning the shared skeleton between the cuts would turn Rotis into four unrelated typefaces instead of one family-system; this is also the main criticism levelled at Rotis — the shared skeleton, in the view of many typographers, sacrificed the legibility of each individual cut for the sake of that systemic consistency.

Principles: (none assigned — the typeface is outside the main Olympic corpus) To verify against the image: exact distribution of serifs across letters; the appearance of the original Adobe/URW specimen catalogue from 1988/89 (here it is a modern reconstruction).