The Future Sign Language: A Critical History of Aicher’s Ideas About Signs and Pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympics

The signs and pictograms designed by Otl Aicher and his team for the Munich Olympics in 1972 are regarded as a milestone in design history. With this work, Aicher responded to what he thought were the most important challenges for signs and pictograms during the 1960s: the lack of grammar and visual clarity. He had specific ideas about this which he expressed in his designs as well as in his writings. So far, these ideas have hardly been explored. This study critically reconstructs the origins, development, and presentation of Aicher’s ideas about signs and pictograms for the Munich Olympics. In these designs, he tried to resolve his love for geometry with his desire to develop a functional sign language. His work in this area represents a pivotal moment in modern design during the 1960s, in which modernist designers switched their preference from abstract sign systems to pictogram systems.