By ALAN COWELL
from The New York Times

It’s hard to fathom that some advertising agency goon actually got paid for designing this idiotic logo. it looks like an experiment in projectile vomiting with red paint. - JS

LONDON, June 6 - It was said to provoke epileptic seizures. Someone compared it to a broken swastika or “some sort of comical sex act between A-The Simpsons.- ” The mayor was not amused.

The rollout of London’s new logo for the 2012 Olympics, in other words, has not been an unalloyed triumph.

Two days after it was introduced on Monday, the logo - a composition of subway-graffitilike, jagged-edged cutouts roughly denoting the figures 2012, in pink and yellow - has become front-page news. One newspaper, The Sun, ran a competition to discover whether amateur designers - two of whom it identified in its pages as a monkey and a blind woman - could do better.

An online petition gathered 35,000 signatures to protest the logo and demand that it be replaced. But perhaps the brouhaha evoked some other considerations, most notably concerning Britons- ambivalent attitude not just to winning the right to stage the Olympics, but also to dealing with innovation, design and success itself.

The logo “is not simple, it is not memorable, it is not beautiful,” the columnist Magnus Linklater wrote in The Times of London. “It is bound to be a success.”

To the 2012 Organizing Committee, “the new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible.”

An animated version on a Web site was withdrawn after advocacy groups representing people with epilepsy said that flashing lights provoked more than 10 seizures among the estimated 23,000 people vulnerable to a photo’sensitive form of epilepsy.

read more at THE NEW YORK TIMES