10th FINA World Championships

The simbolism of the logo

To bring together ideas of Barcelona, water and sport, yet remain simple, easy to reproduce and above all easy to remember and recognise.

The traditional representation of water taking the form of its container was felt to be inadequate. The drop of water (a disc narrowing to a point above) is more a graphic convention than a realistic representation.

The designer proposed a simplification using simple discs, which represent drops as well as molecules.

The second image was to be of an athlete. The circular movement made by a swimmer is perhaps the most distinctive in water sports, particularly swimming.

Also, this circular gesture is found in other events, when throwing the ball in waterpolo or the curl of the springboard diver.

In the same way that the swimmer represented a circular movement, the seashell, an image associated with water, suggests movement in a growing spiral.

This movement has the advantage of being found in the natural world, and of representing growth, evolution and the passage of time (the stopwatch).

Lastly, we felt that Barcelona would best be represented by an image of its best-known architecture by the immortal Gaudí, whose legacy can be seen in various buildings throughout the city.

The sum of these ideas gives us the following: The image of the championship is a group of nine circles spiralling outwards anticlockwise and growing by 80%.
Download the logo (TIFF format).

The designer. Enric Jardí.

Born in Barcelona in 1964. From 1982 to 1985 he studied graphic design in the Elisava School, where, from 1991 to 1995 he taught projects classes and global workshops. In 1983 he began working in different studios (Graphic Comunicació, Quod, etc) until going free-lance in 1986. In 1992 he founded the Propaganda Studio, which he left in order to go solo in 1998. In 1991, along with other designers, he formed the typographic group Typé-tones which developed a series of typefaces distributed world-wide by the Berlin-based FontShop International.

Apart from typography, he has applied himself to magazine layout and design, book covers and websites. He is currently at the Escuela Eina teaching projects.
Enric Jardi's web site.