Lance Wyman.

Art Last night I attended a lecture by designer extraordinaire Lance Wyman at the Liverpool School of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University in which he talked primarily about his work on the graphics for the Mexico Olympics in 1968, whose utilisation of icons and pictograms has gone on to influence the artwork not just on future games but also transit systems and electronic devices, notably iOS.

My original plan was to offer copious notes on the talk, but it occurred to me that it was a fairly polished speech and he must have given it before and sure enough find a recorded version of it from an appearance at the Walker Art Center in New York.  Some of the slides are different and the duration is longer but the content (from a cursory glance) feels roughly the same.  Here's a different recording from four years ago at a design festival.

If you have any interest in design or the Olympics its well worth watching as he demonstrates how very complex information can be communicated with the deceptively simplest of images and how every element has been carefully thought through and has implications in a way which often seems not to be the case in more recent design (see London 2012).  If you want to see his 1968 designs in action, the Olympics have uploaded the official film of the games.