#HTE

The Typographic Design Elements Hidden in the Pyeongchang Olympic Medals

Last night, another thrilling spectacle at the Olympics as longtime archrivals Canada and U.S.A. faced off for the gold in women’s hockey. But before I can get to that, let’s talk about the interesting, largely unseen design elements of the Pyeongchang events’ medals.

First off, you’ve probably seen the medals on TV only from this frontal angle:

The striations appear to be random and fanciful. But if you were up close and could see the edges, a different story emerges. Industrial designer Lee Suk-woo, who established his own ID firm in Seoul just over a decade ago, was tapped to design the medals and wanted to incorporate the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, into the design. After going through 10 iterations, Lee and his design team settled on a version where “Pyeongchang Winter Olympics” is written in Hangeul along the edge, and the characters were then extruded in CAD along the obverse (a fancy word for the front of a coin) to create the striations:

The reverse of the medals contains the name of the event:

The Paralympics medals were designed with additional textures representing elements of nature local to Pyeongchang, as well as “Pyeongchang 2018” written in braille:

Here’s a video of Lee explaining him and his team’s design process on this project:

On to the hockey! The rivalry between the Canada and U.S. Women’s Hockey Teams has been going on for years, and these women really don’t like each other. While checking is technically illegal in women’s hockey, apparently no one told these two teams. Here’s footage of them clashing and discussing the rivalry.

The Canadians have bested the U.S.A. in four out of their last five meetings at the Olympics. When women’s hockey was first introduced to the Olympics in 1998, U.S.A. won gold; but Canada has handily defeated the U.S. in every Olympics since, taking home the gold each time. Sochi in 2014 was a particularly painful loss for the U.S. (video summary here) that treated the world to a sight we know most of you like to see: Weeping Americans.

The anticipation for last night’s game couldn’t have been higher, and once the women took the ice it was clear this was going to be a nail-biter. At the end of the third period it was 2-2, and when the game went into overtime, the Canadians nearly put it away–but had to contend with our brilliant goalie, 20-year-old Maddie Rooney, who kept us in the game with this one:

Overtime expired with no goals and the two teams went into a shootout. Viewers got to see why these two are the best women’s hockey teams in the world: Take a look at this ridiculously skillful shot by Canada’s Melodie Daoust:

The U.S.A.’s Jocelyne Lamoureax-Davidson answered with some fancy stickwork of her own:

With the shootout at 2-2, it call came down to Team Canada’s best player, Meghan Agosta, versus Rooney:

It drives me nuts that NBC is making these videos unembeddable, but you can watch the re-cap of the game here.

Congratulations to the U.S. Women’s Hockey Team! And don’t worry, Canada, we know you’ll be back.