I was in the basement with the brand new Motorola 21 inch color TV and a children's telephone. The wires snaked out and up to the roof where my Dad was on the other toy phone braving the Montana Winter as we tried to get a usable signal. It was my first year of high school and the Winter Olympics would be on in a day or two. The Olympics and we had a COLOR TV!
We sort of got it working by the time the broadcast began. The Olympic symbol was displayed and the story given
... the six colors [including the flag's white background] combined in this way reproduce the colours of every country without exception. The blue and yellow of Sweden, the blue and white of Greece, the tricolor flags of France, England, the United States, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Hungary, and the yellow and red of Spain are included, as are the innovative flags of Brazil and Australia, and those of ancient Japan and modern China. This, truly, is an international emblem.
It's a very clean design, but it offended my sense of mathematics.
My sister had very long hair at the time. Long enough to sit on. She was always working on various braids. The year before I was curious about knots and braids and learned that a simple three strand braid becomes very interesting if you connect the ends. Take three strands here colored red, blue and green. Wrap them in a standard braid and go through one cycle so the colors end up where they've started. (I like to think of braids as musical rounds)
Rather than repeat the process like my sister, bend them back and connect red to red, blue to blue and green to green. You'll be left with three loops that are fully linked, but if you remove one the whole works falls apart. Here's a nice image. Note that they're not really two dimensional circles as they have to pass over and under each other. Making this forces you to use three dimensions.
Technically these are a special case of brunnian links - a nontrivial link (a link is a grouping of the loops here) that becomes a set of trivial (unconnected) circles if you pull out one of the loops. Cut any loop and the whole thing can easily be pulled apart. Do it with five loops and you'd have powerful symbolism for the Olympic movement - or so I thought. I knew you can make brunnian links for any odd number of loops so it was time to draw.
I sketched a five loop version. Cut and remove any loop and it all comes apart. All I had to do was find some way of making a nice drawing. My sister is the arty one. She had all of the right kit including some high quality colored pencils. She also happened to be smart enough to not let me use them - even if I had noble intensions.
Plan B. Every kid has Crayola crayons. I selected five and, after a couple of tries, I had it.
(pretend the colors are accurate. my drawing here is pretty bad, but so was the crayon version)
The drawing went into a special international airmail envelope with an explanation of the math and symbolism. It was addressed to the Olympic organization in Lausanne.. I have yet to hear from them. Apparently crayon drawings from 15 year olds don't make the cut.
I draw quite a bit. It's an integral part of how I think. It isn't pretty and I consider it an ephemeral part of thinking and trash it as soon as it's served it's purpose. If you want meaningful design it's best to use a real designer.
I'm looking forward to the games!
ha ha!
I love your symbolism!
You should have a good designer look at it. With the real colors and picking the right ring size and thickness I think it could be beautiful.
Posted by: Jheri | 11/22/2017 at 09:27 PM