BEIJING—While amateur athletes from around the globe have worked intensely for years to prepare for the summer Olympics in Beijing, so too have the graphic designers responsible for the look of the Games. A recent article in China Daily outlined their training.

Twenty young designers at the Art Research Center for the Olympic Games at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts have been sweating over the meticulous task of designing graphics for the Beijing Olympic Games.

Throughout the process, the designers had to create a look that represented China but would also be attractive to an international audience, ARCOG’s deputy director Hang Hai explains.

The team designed simple but aesthetic patterns based on jingwen, an ancient Chinese script found on 2,000-year-old bronze carvings, to represent 35 different Olympic sports and 20 Paralympic sports displayed in pictograms.

"We had to walk the line between east and west in the design process," Wang Min, dean of the school of design at CAFA, told Daily China.

"What we had to bear in mind is not to turn the Beijing Olympic Games entirely into a celebration of Chinese culture. It needed to have a global feel."

Another major project was the “core” graphic, a wave motif used on banners, posters and billboards. The pattern was inspired by traditional Chinese themes found on zodiac signs, silk fabrics and jade sculptures of dragons.

The team has now shifted its work to the Beijing 2008 Paralympics as well as the Shenzhen 2011 Universiade.

Wang Min hopes the Games will draw attention to China's graphic designers. "Many Japanese graphic designers became world-famous after the 1968 Tokyo Olympics. I hope it will also happen in China in the not too distant future," he says. Contact: en.beijing2008.cn