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, this is exactly the 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 lettering "München", the Olympic rings and dates "26.8.–10.9.", below them the "Strahlenkranz" emblem of the games — all small, all dominance runs through the image, not through text.
3. Colour — an almost monochromatic blue scale (from dark blue to nearly white) for sky and water, white for clouds/the 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, completely subordinate to the image.
5. Message — a cold, bright, technically optimistic place (tower, tents, water) without a single human figure, without a heroised 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 confused with 1936: no monumentality, no black-red-gold, no heroised body. Posterising a photograph of architecture (not of a 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 a pose of strength — the poster would immediately be pulled back toward the iconography it deliberately avoided.

Principles: Palette by exclusion 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 Olympic staff, grouped into rows by colour/function; SFMOMA collection (no title is specifically given on the sheet).
2. Composition — a grid of small photographed figures in uniforms, each group in one colour (red, green, dark blue, orange, turquoise, yellow, neutral beige/grey), with accompanying text blocks next to each group.
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 — not verified against the image.
5. Message — the three-second test: a visitor who doesn't know German can still guess, by colour alone, which service the person they're 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 person's role on the ground.
7. What would kill it — assigning the same colour to two different functions (e.g. media and technical staff) — the system stops being legible and the uniform becomes just clothing.

Principles: Identity is a manual To verify against the image: the exact title of the sheet and the naming of each function/colour.

1. What it is — an 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 together with the venue's name.
3. Colour — beige/sand ground, white road grid, one light blue band for the watercourse, black for text and pictograms — the same discipline, few colours and a methodical approach, as in the rest of the programme.
4. Typography — small, consistent grotesque for the venue names. The specific typeface is not confirmed on this image.
5. Message — the map does not show the city's topography for its own sake but strictly for visitor orientation — everything not relevant to the route to a 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 uniform to 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: Construction others can continue To verify against the image: the exact year of the map's first publication is not confirmed (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 complete 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's a runner" but "here's the rule by which any athlete in motion is drawn".
6. Why exactly this way — constant stroke weight, a fixed set of angles and the separate circular head make a grammar applicable to any sport, regardless of whether Aicher draws it himself or someone else on the team does, a decade later. That's the reason this system could become the DOT pictograms 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 draftsman in line would have no rule to repeat, and the system would fall apart into a collection of individual illustrations.

Principles: Construction others can continue, Pictogram grammar

1. What it is — a series of informational posters with competition schedules by sport (e.g. handball), letterpress and drawing on newsprint. Credit goes only to Aicher, but the work is described as team-produced.
2. Composition — every poster in the same format: at top the mark "München [rings] 1972", in the middle a row of sport pictograms, below a table of competition dates/times; eight posters 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 whole board, 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 board instantly says "this is the schedule for ONE sport/day", because the colour isn't repeated at random 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 are doing the job of a timetable here — proof that the "manual" covers even the driest, least glamorous application of the system.
7. What would kill it — printing all boards in the same colour for the sake of "tidiness" — the system would lose the one function of colour (distinguishing categories from a distance).

Principles: Identity is a manual 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 a series of 21 sport posters; 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 programme direction, not his solo drawing. The same motif (football/soccer) is held in the SFMOMA collection under the title "Soccer poster, Sports Series", attributed to Aicher alone. The discrepancy in credit between the two sources is unresolved.
2. Composition — two footballers colliding/fighting for the ball, framed tightly, filling almost the entire surface; no background beyond flat colour.
3. Colour — posterisation (manual separation of a photograph's tonal values) 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 seen in the available frame).
5. Message — a three-second test: "a collision in sport" is recognisable, but the bodies are so abstracted by the colour arrangement that no single player is portrayed as an individual hero — what remains is a pure, general gesture of motion.
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 the athlete remains a gesture, not a heroised figure — directly avoiding the visual language of 1936, where the athletic body was the central propaganda motif.
7. What would kill it — keeping full photographic detail of the face and muscle definition — it would land straight back in the heroised iconography that the whole programme avoids.

Principles: Palette by exclusion 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 board with a swimming pictogram, still in place in the Olympic swimming hall; the photograph is from 2012 (Henning Schlottmann), the board itself from 1972.
2. Composition — a square board, the swimmer figure (arms extended forward in a dive) built with the same grammar as the runner (work 04) — straight lines, fixed angles, separate circular head, constant stroke weight.
3. Colour — light blue background (the same "apolitical, colour of peace" from the official palette), white pictogram.
4. Message — a three-second test, from across a corridor: "this is swimming" is recognisable without a single word of text, even under night lighting or a poor viewing angle (visible in the photograph itself, shot through glass/roof structure).
5. Typography — not applicable.
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 board on a wall), not on a poster — and, fifty years later, the board is still in place and still legible.
7. What would kill it — printing the pictogram in multiple colours or with shading for "beauty" — at a distance and under poor light it would lose exactly the instant legibility it exists for.

Principles: Construction others can continue, Pictogram grammar

1. What it is — his own typeface family Rotis (1988), the 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 a specimen-sheet layout.
3. Colour — the contemporary specimen uses a green background for legibility; it is not part of the original catalogue appearance. The appearance of the original 1988/89 Adobe/URW specimen has not been verified against the image.
4. Typography — Rotis is conceived as a "superfamily" of four related typefaces/cuts (Serif, Sans Serif, Semi Serif, Semi Sans) sharing the same skeleton and proportions, so they can be mixed without visual clash; Semi Serif is a hybrid in which some letters retain rudimentary serifs and some remain without them. The exact distribution of serifs across letters has not been verified 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 steered the Olympic programme applied to typography.
7. What would kill it — (not applicable to a single piece) — removing 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, according to 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).