Designing From the Landscape: How Travel Inspires Event Branding Systems

Design systems for global events rarely begin on a screen. They begin in the field. When building a brand for something as expansive as the Olympic Games, the goal isn’t just to design a logo—it’s to create a visual language that can scale across venues, merchandise, broadcast graphics, and fan experiences for years. That’s why I love the custom, non-traditional direction seen in projects like Utah 2034. Instead of defaulting to a safe emblem, the identity leans into a custom typographic system inspired by landscape, culture, and place. It’s less about readability at first glance and more about creating something distinctive, flexible, and rooted in the environment it represents.

Travel research is often part of that process. When working on destination-driven brands or major events, taking photos during site visits becomes a creative tool. The shapes of mountains, arches, rock formations, ski runs, and terrain lines start to reveal patterns that can inform typography, iconography, and motion graphics. Those field observations—textures, silhouettes, natural geometry—often become the raw ingredients for a design system. What begins as a photo of a canyon curve or a snow ridge might later evolve into a letterform, a pattern, or a graphic motif repeated across signage, uniforms, and digital content.

That’s what makes these kinds of identities so compelling from a design and experiential standpoint. They’re not just logos; they’re frameworks for storytelling. When a brand is built from the physical character of a place, it carries authenticity and inspiration into every touchpoint—from venue graphics to fan merchandise to the broadcast package seen around the world. The best event brands don’t just represent a host—they feel like they could only exist there.