• Issue 3

Last week Tokyo unveiled its logo as part of its application bid to stage the 2016 summer Olympics, more than eight years away and well before the official shortlist of host cities is announced.

Now that Tokyo has a logo the Japanese capital could feasibly step in and hold next year's Olympiad should Beijing collapse under the weight of change or be swallowed up by a pollution cloud and be unable to stage the world's premier athletic spectacle. (I imagine China would sooner open a Strabucks on every street corner than have the games handed over to their long term rivals).

But back to the logo - a simple aesthetically pleasing knot compiled of the traditional Olympic colours set against a clean white back ground- it is very much in keeping with the historic style of Olympic logos and therefore everything that London's logo is not. The knot motif is traditionally used to decorate gifts, an integral part of Japanese culture. In this case the gift is the Olympics.

Last month London's organising committee unveiled their scatological abstraction, chosen as the logo for both the Olympics and Paralympics, to almost unanimous public derision. London's logo is void of meaning, symbolism and representation - wholly post modern.

The organisers, in spite of the protest, promised that the epileptic jigsaw is here to stay.

Organising events on the scale such as Olympic games and World Cups is a mammoth task - so taking care of the small things should be easier.

London has got off to a miserable start in that their logo - the image that will represent the games for the next four and a bit years is universally unpopular.

A quick look at the logos of the modern Olympics reveals that London's un-emphatic piece de resistance marks a departure in that the designers have chosen to make the year -2012 - as the centrepiece of the design foregoing the city or what it stands for.

Traditionally and historically logos have either depicted the host city or Olympic iconography - the rings or the flame - often combining both in the finished logo, with the year as a secondary feature.

London has chosen to make a partial break with tradition in a contamacious bid to be innovative. Even the colours that London's logo embodies are different: brash and ultimately cheap. Yet one can't help but feel at under half a million pounds - it's a poor attempt.

The more I look at the London logo the harder it is to stray from the image of four splashes of glowing puke or four squashed pigeons.

If only London would entangle the Tokyo logo and form it in to the shape of the meandering Thames.  Then again London is so caught up with the image of itself it's no wonder that it fails both stylistically and on substance.

Images: Tokyo Olmypics Committee and London Olympics Committee