Surfing And Skating Have New Olympic Icons

Like it or not, surfing and skating are coming to the Olympics. Both sports (and yes, I know that the mere act of calling surfing and skating “sports” is enough to make some people curl up in a ball in front of their shrines to Miki Dora and John Cardiel) will be part of the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. The Tokyo Olympics are still more than 500 days away, but the pictograms for all 33 sports that will be on the program—including skateboarding and surfing—have just been revealed.

The pictograms provide a visual language at the Olympics. With so many actual languages being spoken in the host country, the easiest way to communicate information at the various venues is with images. The pictograms for the 2020 Olympics were created by Japanese designer Masaaki Hiromura with an eye toward honoring the Tokyo Games theme of “Innovation from Harmony.” Hiromura worked with a team of designers on the project and was inspired by the icons from the 1964 Olympics in Japan, when pictograms were first introduced. While there are 33 sports that will take place at the 2020 Olympics, some sports have more than one pictogram. In total, Hiromura and his team created 50 unique pictograms for the Games. The process took more than two years.

For the surfing pictogram, Hiromura depicted a regular-footed surfer performing a frontside air over what looks like a lake but is surely meant to depict an ocean wave. The skateboarding pictogram shows a regular-footed skater (no love for the goofy footers from the IOC) doing a frontside boardslide down some kind of rainbow rail.

Hiromura is a well-respected designer in the field of signage who was worked on projects across Japan. “I have tried to express the dynamic beauty of the athletes through these pictograms, while respecting the legacy bequeathed by the pioneers of the Japanese design industry in their designs for the Tokyo 1964 Games,” he said.