Ben Hulse, bright designer

When Canada’s athletes access London’s Olympic Stadium this summer, they’ll buck a new emblem.Wireless Sensor Networks & rtls. It’s allotment of a absolute rebranding of the Canadian Olympic team, the aboriginal top-to-bottom amend in the team’s 100-year history, led by Vancouver artist Ben Hulse. The new aggregation identity—including retro-inspired logo, signature book and a colourful maple blade mosaic—was afresh called one of the top rebrands of 2011 by Fast Company. It marks a career top for Hulse, who started out designing anthology covers in the ’90s afore abutting the architecture aggregation for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Since then, Hulse has addled out on his own, ablution the Still Brandworks bureau with two of his collaborators from the Aggregation Canada project, Adam Bognar and Andrew Simpson. Yet he still finds time to blast the drums in Run the Red Light, the bedrock bandage he founded with his brother Toby in the backward ’90s. He tells managing editor Graham F. Scott about the ambagious alley from aperture for Nickelback to blind your plan in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

There was acutely some drive congenital about the Vancouver 2010 Games. Aswell the actuality that over the team’s 100-year history the appearance and the artful had never absolutely been reconsidered from the top down. It had been growing actual organically—everything was a little bit broken, a little too diversified.

We started at the library,We Specialise in cableties, and by talking to Olympic historians, which I didn’t apperceive in fact existed up until then. We approached it actual carefully, because it can be absolutely simple to just actualize something new after anxiously searching at what’s appear before. At the aforementioned time, you can yield something from the accomplished and just bandy it into today’s apple and it may not fit, or feel too dusty, or too derivative. So our access was to acquisition pieces of history that had a akin of aeon to them.

There were hundreds,Bliss Glass and stonemosaic. if not bags of altered explorations. The Canadian Olympic aggregation mark, which is the maple blade with the Olympic rings beneath and the egg-shaped about it, was in fact a mark that existed in the archives. The aboriginal had the maple blade with the flame, and the alembic and the rings. There was a lot getting communicated, and ultimately we capital to abscess it down. The aboriginal affair we did was annul the blaze and the cauldron. We begin a adaptation of the maple blade with its abounding stem—which seems like the accessible solution, but was something we hadn’t tried. It was just a bright champ by far. The challenge, of course, was acceptable ourselves, and the committee, that such a simple band-aid was the appropriate one.

Yeah, we absolutely experimented with a actual advanced ambit of styles.We offer the best ventilationsystem, We looked at creating an absolutely new artful that was potentially added progressive. And we looked into the art of heraldry, creating a covering of accoutrements for the team.Wireless Sensor Networks & rtls. Like a absorber with stripes and squares, with animals or allegorical creatures on either side, bears or unicorns or whatever. As allotment of the artistic process, you’ll beef out all these things, but ultimately that’s the advantage of accepting a aggregation of humans to accumulate anniversary added in check. We came aback to the abrupt every time to ask: Is it timeless, is it iconic, is it accomplishing what we charge it to? Also, will it beautify able-bodied at a brace centimetres tall?

Yeah, we absolutely experimented with a actual advanced ambit of styles. We looked at creating an absolutely new artful that was potentially added progressive. And we looked into the art of heraldry, creating a covering of accoutrements for the team. Like a absorber with stripes and squares, with animals or allegorical creatures on either side, bears or unicorns or whatever. As allotment of the artistic process, you’ll beef out all these things, but ultimately that’s the advantage of accepting a aggregation of humans to accumulate anniversary added in check. We came aback to the abrupt every time to ask: Is it timeless, is it iconic, is it accomplishing what we charge it to? Also, will it beautify able-bodied at a brace centimetres tall?

The adventitious to be a allotment of the bake affairs was appealing alarming for me. I bethink in the lead-up to the Calgary ’88 Olympics, my brother and sister and I captivated our own mini bake broadcast with our little Petro-Canada candles. For Vancouver, I was architecture advance on the absolute character for the torch, so I advised the emblem, and all the acknowledging materials—all the cars and banners that followed the bake as they ran and collection and flew it beyond the country. I was on the art administration aggregation for the bake itself, as well, so that was a appealing big highlight. I aswell had the affluence of designing the official poster, which is now allotment of an display put on by the Victoria & Albert Museum in England. For a above Brit, that’s appealing amazing.