K-pop-inspired Olympics
When Discovery, owner of Eurosport, was commissioned to broadcast the next four Olympic Games, it committed to attracting a wider, younger audience to make more people interested in the Olympic Games by turning the broadcast of the events into spectacle. That not only called for new, captivating visuals, but also a number of other social, digital activities, with social media platforms being the focal point.
London-based branding agency, DixonBaxi, in cooperation with pan-European television sports network, Eurosport, have created a K-pop-inspired identity for the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 that ended last month, in an attempt to reach a younger audience.
Aporva Baxi, co-founder and ECD of DixonBaxi says, “I’m excited that the team have been able to build on our strong creative relationship with Eurosport. The launch of the ‘Home of the Olympics’ last year laid solid foundations for its PyeongChang 2018 campaign and an exciting opportunity to create a digital first brand identity and help deliver on their commitment to engage more people, on more screens than ever before across Europe.”
Since South Korean culture is a current global trend, especially for DixonBaxi’s young target group, the brand was inspired to partner with Eurosport to produce a campaign for the Games that conveys the K-pop music video vibe by using neon colours injected into the previously white winter landscape of the platform.
Dan Capstick, creative director at DixonBaxi says, “Signalling its commitment to engage new and younger audiences, Eurosport undertook a radical transformation of their entire brand experience. With every single brand element changing for the two-week period, it delivered a powerful message to the audience: that Eurosport were going to do it differently and bravely, for sports fans and new audiences across Europe.”
DixonBaxi, wanting to achieve a never-before-seen look for the brand, partnered with director of photography James Medcraft, to film and photograph the athletes under UV light while shooting UV paint at them. A visual inspired by the intensity of Olympic sports.
The logo – consisting of a minimalist outline of a mountain – represents the collaboration of Eurosport, the Olympics and PyeongChang 2018. The angular shapes and bold graphic slices create an intense look that can be efficiently translated in digital design, as well as in advertising. Everything DixonBaxi crafted for Eurosport, from social kits, to graphic systems were designed for optimum mobile legibility.
The PyeongChang Olympics logo was rendered from the distinctive Korean written language, Hangul. Hangul was also the inspiration for both the typography and the pictograms, with a font called ‘ES Pyeongchang 2018’ being created along with a limited group of pictograms for every sport. The pictograms and typeface integrated for a visually stimulating end result that gave the brand a Korean aesthetic.
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