

Blowing for gold: does this really look like Lisa Simpson? Photograph: London 2012/PNS

A quietly spoken and clearly thoughtful boy at an infant school interviewed for the 10.30pm news last night got it exactly right. He told ITV's reporter in no uncertain terms what he thought of the newly unveiled London 2012 Olympics logo. "Rubbish". And, who could possibly disagree? Surely not those who have likened the image to cartoon character, Lisa Simpson, giving London a blow job. Oh dear. I'm sorry. But, it does look like that. And who, even the cleanest minded among us, is going to think anything else now?

Yesterday was not April 1, although you might have had to pinch yourself as you checked the calendar. Surely the graphic designers (sorry, "brand consultants") who came up with this dismal £400,000 design had been playing around in the studio. It's all been a joke, 100 per cent visual satire, a smutty-minded game played, one can't help thinking, by young designers, fed up with the whole bullying, secretive, puerile London Olympics fiasco as this desperately "well wicked" and "down with kids" juggernaut, this Millennium Experience Mk2, with gangs of imaginatively paid consultants and fawning toadies in search of CBEs and knighthoods, hanging from its money-shedding sides, rumbles towards Stratford and 2012.

Sadly, the logo, already likened to a "broken swastika" - a very punk swastika - may yet be with us for another five desperate years. This is the way we want to be seen by the rest of the world now that we live, according to Olympics executives and government ministers, in a world in which we are all "modern", "flexible", "brand savvy" and young people (ie "kids", those baseball-capped, consumer-crazy, skateboarding yoof we need to get down with) "no longer relate to static logos." Innit.

Look at the throwaway word "London" plonked inside the logo; the lettering appears to be based on the kind of crude, knife-carved scrawl most often found on the walls of public lavatories. It stinks. And, it implies that London is little more than, if not one big toilet, the façade of a high street chain store.

The logo fails the Olympics spirit completely. Its component parts are broken apart, while the Olympics are all about athletes, spectators and nations joining together. Now look at the original Olympics symbol, designed by Pierre de Coubterin, founder of the modern Games, in 1913 and first displayed at the Antwerp Olympics of 1920. This is a superb design, its five intertwined rings evoking the idea of continents linked together. It is far from being "static", and is as eye-catching and as appropriately expressive of the Olympics today as it was in those unfortunate days gone by when people (no "kids" then) eeked out a savvyless living without, like, "brands" to sustain them.

The problem with all this is that the new logo is fundamentally patronising. Would-be adults in charge of events like the London 2012 Olympics should put childish things, language and "brand savvy" logos aside. No child is impressed by parents who try to dress like infants in, for example, all-day pyjama outfits and baseball caps, or who try to speak in the latest, and supposedly fashionable, jargon.

The Olympics should exist to raise our collective hopes, expectations and sights. This logo, though, is one of the saddest modern sights of all, and this from a city that produced the rightly world-famous London Transport logo. There are no medals here. Only "rubbish".