The Archives and Records Association’s section for Business Records held their annual Summer Seminar on 19th September on the theme of the Olympics and Jen Grasso shared some relevant material from the Design Archives Collections alongside speakers from the International Council of Archives’ Section of Sports Archives, University of East London and the University of Leicester.
The University of Brighton Design Archives is an award-winning archive of British & international industrial & communication design. Founded in 1995, the Design Archives holds around 22 collections focusing on designers and design organisations of the mid-to late 20th century; both institutional archives as well as archives of individual designers, many of whom worked together, and often for one or more of these organisations, creating a rich collection of records about design practice, design advocacy and design networks of the mid-20th century.
Olympic records feature in several of the Design Archives’ collections and examples from these collections are indicative of the types of records the Design Archives hold. The first collection with records relating to the Olympics is the archive of Alison Settle (1891-1980). Settle was a journalist, a champion of women’s rights, editor of British Vogue, and a contributor to the Council of Industrial Design. Her archive offers insights into the worlds of fashion, textile and clothing manufacturing, design promotion, as well as women’s professional practice. She wrote a regular column for The Observer called From A Women’s Viewpoint, and later, Alison Settle’s Viewpoint, commenting on, and critiquing contemporary fashions, including two articles about the women’s uniforms for the 1948 and 1956 Olympic games. In her 1948 article, Settle notes the newly designed uniforms are an ‘opportunity to show [Britian’s] leadership in design.’ In contrast, her 1956 article critiques that year’s uniforms, noting their unfemininity, comparing them to unflattering school uniforms, (Image 01).
Image 01, From a Woman’s Viewpoint, 1948, AST/5/A48/21, and Alison Settle’s Viewpoint, 1956, AST/5/A56/44, Alison Settle Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives
The 1948 Olympics also feature in another collection, HA (Arnold) Rothholz (1919-2000), one of a number of emigre designers whose archives are held at the Design Archives. Rothholz emigrated to Britain from Germany in 1933, enrolling at the Reimann School where he studied commercial art and display design. Rothholz designed posters for clients including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) and the Post Office, as well as promotional material for Wembley Stadium, and in 1951 he was commissioned to work on the Festival of Britain. Throughout the 1960s he re-branded Winsor & Newton art packaging and produced a new corporate identity for Wellcome. Rothholz’s Olympic material is a prime example of the type of material often found in a designer’s archive; draft artwork as well as an example of the final design, in this case Rothholz’s poster design for the 1948 London Olympics, (Image 02).
Image 02, London 1948 draft artwork and final design. RHZ/1/1/31, HA Rothholz Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives
Olympic records feature differently in one of our organisational archives, the ICOGRADA archive. ICOGRADA, or the International Council of Graphic Design, now known as the International Council of Design, has been the professional world body for graphic design and visual communication since it was founded in London in 1963. A voluntary grouping of world-wide associations with a strong educational remit, it promotes the role of graphic design in both society and commerce, and its archive comprises approximately 2000 posters from around the world, as well as library holdings, and documentation relating to governance, administration and educational activities. Three Olympic games are represented with posters in the ICOGRADA archive; Munich 1972, Montreal 1976, and Seoul 1988.
Prominent German graphic designer Otl Aicher and his team designed this well-known suite of posters for the Munich 1972 games. One of Aicher’s techniques was the use of pictograms to help visitors navigate the Olympic sites, and these pictograms influenced the pictograms developed by the United States Department of Transportation several years later (Image 03).
Image 03, (L-R) Munich 1972. ICO/3/13/134, ICO/3/13/112, ICO/3/13/134, ICO/3/13/120, ICOGRADA Archives, University of Brighton Design Archives.
The official poster for the Montreal 1976 games was designed by Design Collaborative Ernst Roch and Rolph Harder who were important designers in the Canadian Modernist movement.2 Alongside this is a suite of posters titled ‘Canada 1976’, which was an educational outreach initiative from the Artists-Athletes Coalition, assisted by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and Wintario, and these were distributed free to schools, art galleries, libraries, and participants, (Image 04).
04, Canada, 1976. ICO/3/6/1, ICO/3/6/2, ICO/3/6/3, ICO/3/6/4, ICO/3/6/5, ICO/3/6/6, ICO/3/6/8, ICO/3/6/9, ICO/3/6/10, ICO/3/6/11, ICOGRADA Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives.
A final poster from the ICOGRADA Archive is from the Seoul 1988 Olympic games, designed by Kim Hyun, and another example of the different ways the Olympics Games have been represented in graphic and poster design, (Image 05).
05, Seoul,1988. ICO/3/20/1, ICOGRADA Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives.
Together, this set of records from the Alison Settle, HA Rothholz and ICOGRADA archives not only highlight the finished designed product but also provide insight into the designer’s process, design’s function as part of wider cultural and social outreach, as well as critique about design, as it relates to the Olympic games.
More information about the University of Brighton Design Archives and its collections can be found on our website, as well as on the ArchivesHub, Instagram and Twitter/X.
