The Olympic games are not just a challenge for athletes, but for their designers. The world’s preeminent international sports competition has to level the playing field for communication too. Each sports event, each amenity needs clear wayfinding, and in a minimum of three languages. Those graphics need to stand above the crowd and out in the arena. Given that challenge, what would you do?

If you are Lance Wyman, you opt instead to make a picture. And this is exactly what he did, when he was 29 and won the competition to design the graphics for the Mexico ’68 Olympics. Nineteen pictures, one for each sport; 19 more for the cultural events; more still for restrooms, concessions, transportation. Rather than a sea of words, you create a hierarchy of icons anyone can understand. You put your graphics on free-standing signs, on pavements, on walls, so that they become a pattern in the city.

If you are Lance Wyman, you take that system of visual icons and you keep making it new. For metros in Mexico City and Washington, DC. For zoos in DC and Minnesota. Music, Mayan architecture or moose, when you go back to those cities 20, 30, 40 years later, you find they are still using your system. In Mexico City, they have extended your subway graphics, introduced in 1969, from three lines to 12, and from the underground to the BRT. When you look on an iPhone, 40 years later, you find icons made of the same simple shapes, the same rounded corners. Why? “They take up less space than words and they can be a common language, no translations needed.”

Lance Wyman began his career working for George Nelson, soon after graduating from Pratt in 1960. He created his first visual icons while working on the Chrysler Pavilion for the 1964-65 World’s Fair, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. While at the Nelson Office, he got the opportunity of a lifetime, an audition to design the identity for the Mexico ’68 Olympic Committee. He, his new wife Neila, and partner Peter Murdoch bought one-way tickets to Mexico for a two-week trial, at the end of which they produced what many still consider to be the best Olympic logo ever. But he also created his second set of visual icons, which have proved to be a sustaining element in his ongoing design practice, working as well for Mexico City today as they did in the 1960s. Today, Wyman lives and practices in New York City, continuing to design identity and wayfinding systems for transportation and cultural projects. He is currently working on a new visitors map for the National Gallery of Art in Washington. A retrospective of his work is scheduled for October 2014 at MUAC, the University Museum of Contemporary of Art in Mexico City.

