3 tips for your work week, plus a designer’s rundown of every Olympic logo since 1936
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Issue #139: how to disagree and commit, expecting the unexpected, and Olympic design
By Harris Sockel
Three doses of practical wisdom for your week:
- Scott McNealy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, coined the phrase “disagree and commit” in the ’80s before it was popularized by Jeff Bezos as one of Amazon’s core principles. It’s a piece of actionable advice built on the principle that consensus never works on a team trying to do great things.
- Related to ^ that, VP of engineering at Khan Academy Mason F. Matthews acknowledges how hard it can be to actually commit to a decision you disagree with. One strategy for managing this? Set up a meeting far in advance with everyone who agreed and disagreed with a decision at the time it was made, so you can all step back and ask yourselves if it was the right one.
- We tend to think that being able to perform well under pressure is an innate talent, but it’s a skill. The more you teach yourself to embrace surprises (good or bad), the more you’ll excel. Expect the unexpected this week!
Also today: critiquing Olympic logos
The 33rd Olympic games came to a close yesterday — congratulations to Léon Marchand for taking home the most gold medals (4). I dug through the Medium archive over the weekend and found this rundown of every Olympic logo from 1936 to 2016, written by Twitter’s former VP of design, Mike Davidson. Think of it like the Olympics of Olympic design: each of these 42 logos earns a score out of 100 based on the following criteria:
- Craftsmanship (spacing, alignment, composition)
- Timelessness (does it hold up?)
- Typography (simplicity, readability)
- Overall impression (how does it make you feel?)
“Logos are like leather jackets,” Davidson writes, “the more complicated they are, the more quickly they will go out of style.” It’s a true feat to create something both simple and memorable.
The lowest-scoring logo? Berlin 1936, dinged for its amateurish line work and forgettable rings:
The highest-scoring? Mexico City 1968, which is best appreciated within the context of its psychedelic design system. This logo’s designer, Lance Wyman, declared that his goal was “to make geometry sing” — what do you think?
And here’s the poster it was designed to be a part of, inspired by the geometric optical-illusion art that was in vogue during the ’60s:
Quiz: Zoom In
Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.
Friday’s winner: Paulo Maggi for the correct answer of the flowers next to the window in the “deliverable” house from Torsten Walbaum’s story, “Done Is Better Than Perfect” Thanks for playing, Paulo!
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
