Raffaela Panie: Designing the brand and visual identity for the 2026 Olympic Winter Games

0:01Raffaela Panie:I think flexibility needs to be in the system, but also in the people. And that's where I think we really succeeded in having a really good, strong staff, but very, very flexible and trying to be created not only in designing things, but also in thinking about the ways of getting around problems. I think creativity is also in the way you do things, and that can help a lot when you need something so flexible.

0:30Every four years, the Olympic Games capture the world's attention, not just through athletic achievement, but through a complete visual identity that must resonate across cultures, languages, and generations. It's one of the most demanding design challenges in the world, creating a brand that honors Olympic heritage while reflecting the unique spirit of a host city and region. Rafaela Panayi is the brand, identity, and look director for the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games, which means she's responsible for how billions of people will experience these games visually. From the opening ceremony to the medals, from venue designs to digital platforms, it's a project that requires balancing tradition with innovation, local culture with global recognition, and multiple stakeholders with a singular creative vision.

1:23In our conversation, Raffaella shares what it takes to design for one of the world's most recognizable brands, how she's weaving Italian design heritage into the visual language of the games, and the unique challenges of creating an identity that needs to work everywhere from mountain venues in Cortina to urban spaces in Milano, all while serving athletes, spectators, broadcasters, and digital audiences simultaneously. Whether you're designing for scale, managing complex creative projects, or figuring out how to honor history while pushing forward, Raffaella's insights into Olympic design will change how you think about brand systems.

1:56This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Willard. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more.

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3:03We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

3:25And now, back to the show.

3:33Rafaela Pannier, welcome to Design Better.

3:36Raffaela Panie:Thank you for having me. You're taking on an incredible project, you and your team, working on the look for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano. I'm curious about the scope of this. When I think about a design project, generally there's sort of like, these are the places where these design ideas, concepts will be deployed. But with something like the Olympics, it is so vast. Can you walk us through, like, what's the scope of the project that you and your team are working on? Well, the scope is vast. It's a big challenge. That's what makes it special. And something people don't realize is that you are doing all this for maybe four years, if you're very, very lucky, five years.

4:19Raffaela Panie:And you're building a brand that normally takes four or five years, if you think of a company. And when it gets to its maximum highest peak, it's the end. So that's really, really strange. And the way you work around it is, first of all, we have an important base start, which is the Olympic and Paralympic values and their branding. So it's sort of a safe start. But then, of course, you've got the whole world in front to work on. And what helps is trying to have a consistent and very structured, strong brand personality. That was one of the first things we really started working on. And it's really been guiding us in all our choices.

5:02Raffaela Panie:The other thing is also doing step by step. So we did have a vision from the beginning. Brand personality, as I said, has always been our guide. But then we've also made sure that every step we've made, because it is building a brand made of many steps, that every time we make a step, it's consolidated. And the next one we make and the next project we work on is consistent with what we've done before. What assets specifically are you creating? Just give us a sense. So you're working on things like metals. You're working on stadium assets as well. What are the types of things that you're making?

5:41Raffaela Panie:That's also one of the fun parts, I must say. I sometimes think I'm not really doing money. It's not really a job at the end. It's really, I mean, I'm enjoying it so much. It's sometimes difficult to think of it as a job because some of the projects are just so different from each other. As you mentioned, it's metals design, it's torch design, which is more similar to a kind of industrial design. But then there's all the brand assets, the graphic design part, the mascot. The mascot started with the drawing of a kid and is now a costume character. We made a cartoon out of it. So it's really starting from one point and then going into other fields, which I think is also very interesting.

6:19Raffaela Panie:We've been designing the emblems, the sub-brands. We've created a whole architecture of sub-brands, trying to be consistent in terms of colors, but also in terms of the actual structure, architectural structure of those sub-brands. So yes, very, very vast. That look of the games is probably our last one to be seen, and that is something that we will see during the games. So even for us, most of the assets have been unveiled at the moment, but that will be our cherry on the cake. So when we will be able to see all that look of the games in the venues at games time. The games have a long history.

6:54The Winter Olympics started back in 1924, so it's been over 100 years now. And along with that, there's a sort of arc of brand identities that have been created over the years. How do you all draw upon that and think about that as you shape the current brand?

7:10Raffaela Panie:It's in every organizing committee's scope to start from those Olympic and Paralympic brand elements that we spoke about before, but then build upon its own culture, depending on wanting to look at back or look at front going towards the future, which is what we've decided to do at the end. And also a lot of studying. I think that's part of the process. Every time an organizing committee starts the brand process, everybody always goes back and sees what has been done to learn from it, to learn from mistakes, because sometimes you learn also from mistakes of others and trying to look for inspiration.

7:47Raffaela Panie:But at the end, it's really finding its own way. And I think culture, the culture of the nation is what at the end helps you in that, because that is something so specific to every country. You mentioned the values of the Olympics and the Paralympics and the brand personality that you and your team were creating. Could you walk us through those? The Olympic and Paralympic values are mostly about universal. So they talk about living together the experience of sport and how sport can help you overcome your limits. And it's very important as a starting point. But of course, that is not talking about the nation itself.

8:26Raffaela Panie:It's not talking about your own country. What we've decided to do is to look at our past, but thinking about the future. We had a big discussion when we started all our brand personality structure and strategy. And it was, should we look back at our tradition? We have such a rich culture and tradition. But we thought, you know, that's there. We don't probably want to talk about it, not because we don't believe in it, because we don't value it, but just because everybody already knows about our history. So maybe we want to talk about something more modern, more contemporary, more young. So that's the route we decided to go to.

9:05Raffaela Panie:We did a lot of interviews and it came out that the word beauty was in every interview we made, in every focus group, and we did workshops. And it was always talking about beauty, beauty, beauty. And we thought that is something a bit dangerous. We don't want to talk about Italy and beauty. It wouldn't be anything innovative, but it was very strong. I mean, people were asking us to talk about beauty somehow. So we decided to do that in a different way. We decided to try to understand where beauty is more under the surface. And that's where we went to pick our values. So it's more the beauty of the people.

9:40Raffaela Panie:It's the beauty that is in the energy, in the passion of people, in the talent. So these have become more of our keywords. And that's how we've built our brand personality, trying to represent what we call the Italian spirit. And we want it to be vibrant, dynamic and contemporary. So these are our keywords. And can you give us an example of how your team has translated those principles into the brand itself? We've always done that in all our decisions. I can give you the example of the mascot. Mascot design started from schools, from kids, quite different to what we've got today, which is normal process.

10:19Raffaela Panie:And what we did there was try to understand how we could give that personality of the brand to an animal. And that's where a production company helped us a lot in transforming a design, a drawing into a character, giving that personality that is vibrant and dynamic, making sure that these two animals that are two stoats are equally nice, passionate, full of energy, enjoying their spirit, enjoying their life in the mountains, as well as in the city, being friendly with each other. So that's just probably one of the examples. I would say also the look of the games is another. There's a lot of vibrancy in there.

11:00Raffaela Panie:Our motto is, it's your vibe. So that goes back to what I said before, we've been building on step by step. The vibes are part of our look of the games. And then our motto came out, okay, we want people to have their own vibe when they come to the games. Again, our brand personalities, Italian spirit, vibrant, dynamic and contemporary. That's how we've built on each one of these elements. You mentioned interviews. Could you talk us through your research process? What does that look like in addition to interviews? What do the interviews themselves look like? We, of course, do focus groups and researches on the brand done continuously, but that was a specific moment that we decided to concentrate on people.

11:44Raffaela Panie:When we were working on our brand personality. We didn't want an agency to just come along and say, this is what we think you should be. We wanted people to tell us. So we did some workshops with internal people, with some of the staff. We did some interviews, but then we also went out of the organization, of course, and we spoke to mayors, to the mayors of the host cities. We got to the minister of sport. We spoke to some of the sponsors, some of the domestic sponsors, but also the international sponsors, the one that have been there for years and years and asking, you know, seeing from an international point, what you see in these games is special.

12:24Raffaela Panie:How would you like these games to be remembered? And then we went to a group of 2 ,000 personas in Italy because we wanted to get out of the Olympic territory and go to a broader audience in the rest of the country. So that was really a work of quite a few months doing all these interviews, but also going through all the content and trying to summarize different points of view. And that's where that word beauty came out so much. But we, I think the big work that we did with the support of the agency was trying to make sure that that was something that we could actually use then in our future projects.

13:04Does your team look at symbology from ancient Olympics or just symbology through history and try to find ways to pull that into what you're doing today?

13:15Raffaela Panie:No, we didn't because when we were working on that brand personality, that was an important point where we decided we don't want to look back. It's there. We've got this huge heritage that people fortunately already know about. And we probably didn't feel that that was the right way to go. We wanted something more modern, contemporary. I think when you speak about Milano and Cortina and Italy in general, I think it's nice for people to look more towards the future than towards what's already been done and what they already know. You mentioned that part of the process is trying to avoid mistakes, learning from mistakes that might have happened in the past.

13:55And there are certainly games like, say, the 2012 London Games where some of the branding wasn't all that well received or became a bit controversial. How do you sort of navigate the tension between wanting to be forward-looking and create something new, but also create something that people will embrace?

14:12Raffaela Panie:Some things are there, whatever you do, even if you go for contemporary. And I think that's probably the heritage that is there. I mean, it's not that it leaves you and it evolves. And I think if you look at our iconic posters, we've launched them a few weeks ago, and you can see how the history of the graphic design of posters and also in the advertising history of Italy, you can see signs of that and see how they do look at the past. But at the same time, they really look very contemporary. And I think that's sort of the good balance. It's definitely something that you would put into a contemporary direction, but still you can see elements from the past there and the history there.

14:59I would assume just because of the vast scope of the work that you're doing, you've got to think about modularity, flexibility for this design system. How do you and your team approach that?

15:11Raffaela Panie:That's a good question, especially when it's on the design of the graphic design system, because, I mean, the medal is the medal that once it's designed, it's set. Same for the torch, same for the mascots. When you come to the look of the games and all that graphic design system, that's where, first of all, the system evolves. We've always spoken about this project as a living creature. It changes so much, and it has changed since the beginning so much, because when we started, we were applying it on very small elements, which were the first ones that needed the look of the games. and now we are testing that system to be printed on meters and meters of material that then needs to wrap grandstands.

15:58Raffaela Panie:So for example in the system, the graphic system that we have, there are a lot of shades of colors and some of that shading, some of those gradients are created by little points and dotted elements that put together create the shade and they also give at the same time the sense of snow and ice. Well, those, when you print them in small, one thing, when you print them on a huge four by five meter material, the effect is completely different. So we've also been adapting files and creating different systems of files according to what we are printing on. All that is not necessarily very clear at the beginning of the process, of course.

16:41Raffaela Panie:So I think flexibility needs to be in the system, but also in the people. And that's where I think we really succeeded in having a really good, strong staff, but very, very flexible and trying to be creative, not only in designing things, but also in thinking about the ways of getting around problems. I think creativity is also in the way you do things, and that can help a lot when you need something so flexible. Rafaela, how big is your team that's working on this project? And what are some of the other teams that you need to coordinate with doing this work? The brand and look of the games team is 33 people divided in three groups.

17:19Raffaela Panie:One is the brand. The staff that is working on brand is actually developing the mascot, the torch design, the metal design, doing all the approvals because any asset of the brand that sponsors, licensees, or stakeholders use, every single use of those needs to be approved through a complex process where sometimes it's legal, sometimes it's marketing, but it is always brand at the end, giving the final approval. So there's a part of the staff doing that. We've produced, I think, more than 100 guidelines for each one of these assets. Then there is the creative staff. They work in applying all these assets.

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