Enlightenments to the Beijing Winter Olympic Games: A Review of Main Color Schemes for Olympic Games

Abstract

The upcoming Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Game is the largest sports event for Beijing since the 2008 Olympic Games. Both the Chinese government and Chinese people are giving great efforts presenting the perfect Winter Olympics to the world. From the perspective of visual design scheme for the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, color scheme is the foundation of the whole visual design system, thus the importance of color scheme is self-evident. This paper discusses the main color schemes of the Summer Olympic Games and the Winter Olympic Games during 1980–2020 through analyzing the reasons of color selection, color image scales, word image scales, and the properties of hue, blackness and chromaticness based on the NCS color space. According to the results of analysis, the color schemes for the Summer Olympics focus more on appearing the local landscape or culture of the hosting city/country, while the color schemes for the Winter are often developed with the season and Olympic elements. Hard colors should be avoided, soft and warm colors or soft and cool colors are more popular choices to choose. colors which combined by green and blue are seldom used, medium or high blackness colors are rarely used, and low chromaticness colors are rarely used. But the proportion of using low chromaticness colors is bigger in the color schemes of the Winter Games. These findings give instructive advices to the color scheme for Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.