Can you name all 24 events at the Winter Olympics at PyeongChang from memory? Of course not, nobody can. But I bet you could do really well if I showed you illustrations of each event. You can try it here.

Imagery and easily-understood iconography is a necessity of an event like the Olympics, with so many cultures coming together in one place. Visual symbols create a universal language that everyone can understand. They cut through complexity and put everything you need to know into one image.

So, easy right? You just draw some figures playing sports. Not so fast. There’s more involved in developing these little floating head athletes than you could possibly imagine.

The iconography of Olympic events, often referred to as pictograms, has a long, historic and storied past. For every Olympic Games, there comes with it a hosting city looking to make a good impression. And the design and illustration that surrounds the event is the carefully-crafted representation of all that goes into making that impression — both in the utilitarian job of providing easy direction to outsiders who come to visit, as well as the more esoteric job of capturing the hosting city’s ethos. So, as is often the case with design, it’s a much bigger job than it looks from the final product.

For a design firm, this is their Olympics, too.

So, it was with wide eyes that the design community watched, on January 25th, the unveiling of the new set of pictograms for the 2018 Olympics, by the PyeongChang Organizing Committee. As usual, the announcement comes with a brief explanation of the concept behind the approach:

“They have been designed based on the Korean alphabet known as Hangeul. This is a system of letters that is unique to Korea and it was also used in the design of the official Games emblems. From the 16 vowels and 14 consonants of Hangeul that exist, four consonants and three vowels were selected and have been reflected in the pictograms.” — POCOG Press Office

The new icons quickly went into effect, appearing in nearly every aspect of Olympics communications: signage, tickets, programs, clothing, TV graphics and pretty much anything else you can imagine.