HELPING special olympiANs MEDAL WITH THEIR ARTISTIC TALENT

BRAND PLATFORM, EVENT, LOGO DESIGN, BRAND GUIDELINES, SOCIAL PR

The mission of the Special Olympics is to ‘allow people with disabilities to experience joy and participate in a sharing of gifts, skills and friendship’. To help demonstrate this, my design team helped them prove this mission by enlisting actual athletes to help develop the branding for The 2022 Games.

I led a team of designers and art directors to run a weekend-long ‘logo workshop’, where we had 10 athletes join us in Florida to develop typography, colors, sketches and logo ideas. We worked closely with each athlete to encourage each to bring their artistic talents from comic book art to cake decorating, and to create many versions of what the logo could be. This pushed many of the athletes (and honestly, ourselves) out of our normal ways and roles of working, but allowed all of us to have fun, grow and create something special together. After the workshop, we worked with the leadership team for the Special Olympics to select the best parts of each artist’s designs and combined them to create a single ‘master mark’.

This final logo was was an incredible representation of the abilities that each of these athletes brought to the project, and left a design that sparked joy by the artists, our team and the event organizers.