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I recently learned the story of the 1972 Summer Olympic Games “pictograms” and the impact of the artist behind these iconic images.

Three artists were extraordinarily influential in the use of abstract pictograms to help inform, educate and guide athletes and spectators to the many venues and destinations during these massive sports spectacles, which attracted people from across the globe speaking many different languages. Masaru Katzumie and graphic designer Yoshiro Yamashita pioneered the original concept of pictograms for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.

However, the pictograms created by Otl Aicher (1922–1991) for the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics Games’ iconography, visual language, and the event’s all-encompassing graphic schemes are worth a closer examination.

Aicher was already a highly successful and influential German designer who had survived the horrors of Nazi Germany and was a co-founder of the Bauhaus-inspired Ulm College of Design. He embraced functionality and efficiency in design with all his commercial clients.

To achieve his personal goal to “maintain the positive aspects of Berlin while at the same time eradicating its negative connotations,” Aicher created a universal visual language through his pictograms that was used on virtually all visual Olympic communications including tickets, directional signage, programs, awards presented to competitors, and much more.

We’ll find that these innovative pictograms have been adopted and adapted almost universally around the world by other venues as a means to communicate across languages and cultures, especially at airports, transit lines, and other places where diverse crowds gather and transverse.

When successfully designed, these abstract shapes evoke a sense of reassurance and anticipation to the viewer trying to maneuver and find directions to a destination as they navigate through and towards unfamiliar territories and landscapes.

My first job after graduating from the University of Southern California in 1983 was working in the marketing department at First Interstate Bancorp in downtown Los Angeles. Shortly after I left eleven years later, the bank was acquired by Wells Fargo Bank.

Here’s a photo found recently in a dusty box at the back of the workshop from one of the most successful marketing campaigns my team created at the time.

So let’s take a trip in the First Interstate Bank Time Machine… to 1985 when we launched “CIRRUS” the ATM network, which allows customers to use the ATMs of other banks. Today, we take that convenience of using any ATM we see for granted – but in 1985 when First Interstate Bancorp was one of the founding banks that launched CIRRUS, it was a revolutionary idea in banking convenience.

This multi-media promotion helped educate our competitors’ customers that they could use our “Day & Night Teller” ATMs. The campaign featured “everyday” bank employees, including Andrew Perez of Corporate Banking (shown here holding the “Cirrus” Card) along with animated characters from Universal Studios, holding the ATM cards of our competitors, including Wells Fargo and Bank of America.

It was quite the challenge getting the legal and copyright clearances from all the banks, to say the least.

The window decals shown above, just one of the many advertising elements of the campaign, were installed at hundreds of the bank’s locations across Southern California.

It sure was fun and very successful, with many legendary behind-the-scenes stories that perhaps someday deserve to be told… I wish I still had a copy of the television, billboard, and radio ads… maybe I’ll find one in a dusty box somewhere!

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest form of appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” – John F. Kennedy

Photographed on the tarmac at the Palm Springs Airport, 09.11.21

Friends ask me why I seldom accept commissions that involve photographing people or fashion models.

My answer is simple… When I take a picture of a dog, the dog never complains.

A few photographs of amazing and beautiful model jet airplanes at the 18th Annual Coachella Jet Jam 2022 hosted by the Coachella Valley R/C Club in February.

One of my favorite places awaits at the bottom of this trail.

At first, I was bummed when I saw light leak streaks across some of my photographs taken during the 2022 Bombay Beach Biennale. But I made prints anyway, and now I’m really starting to like the effect. Alas, I fixed the camera’s light leaks, and the look is gone forever – at least for now.