A first look at the vibrant branding for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics

It’s still more than two years until the cauldron lights up for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but we now know what the multibillion-dollar global sports spectacle will look like. The design team at LA28, the local organizing committee for the games, has given Fast Company a preview of the concepts and visuals that will guide the look and feel of the 2028 Olympics.

The design approach is conceptually based on the superbloom, a natural phenomenon sometimes experienced in Southern California when an unusually wet winter leads to an explosively colorful spring bloom of wildflowers. The LA28 design approach uses bright, almost neon tones and an abstract graphic that will become the basis for the design of everything from stadium decorations to event tickets to promotional material and signage plastered across Southern California.

“It’ll take over miles of printed graphics, probably the same amount of digital screens, thousands of pieces of sport equipment from batons to hurdles to rugby balls,” says Geoff Engelhardt, head of brand and design for LA28. As a branding expert who has worked in the Olympics sphere since a stint with Team USA’s official outfitter, Ralph Lauren, for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Engelhardt is deeply versed in the history and complexity of designing for the games. Working alongside LA28 executive design director Ric Edwards, Engelhardt has helped craft a 250-page guidebook that sets the visual tone for every aspect of the games. “All of these things will carry our look,” Engelhardt says. “To create a system that can work for all of that was quite challenging.”

The superbloom concept became a framework for this design language, providing a vibrant color scheme as well as the visual form of flower petals to guide the graphic treatment. The team developed a core superbloom graphic made of 12 long horizontal rows that are subdivided into kaleidoscopic arrays of primary and secondary colors. Different patterns within the graphic form 13 discrete “blooms” that represent different aspects of L.A.’s culture and history, including its status as a world stage, a culinary crossroads, and a diverse melting pot. The shapes within each bloom are designed to seamlessly flow into each other, allowing them to either stand alone on a poster or flow together for miles along a marathon route.  

“It was really important that we developed a toolkit that worked for millions of brand impressions,” says Edwards. “Each real estate is not always a one-by-one square ratio or perfect rectangle. You have to solve for everything and anything.”

A high bar for L.A. Olympic design

Defining the visuals of a Summer Olympics is no small task, but it carried an even greater weight in L.A., which last hosted the event in 1984 and had one of the most beloved designs in Olympics history. Led by the design firm Sussman/Prezja, the look of the 1984 Olympics was a flamboyant and celebratory event that diverged from the more conventional and austere Olympics of the past.

Defined by a bold magenta, yellow, and teal color scheme that spread across dozens of sites and venues in the city, it became a widely celebrated and influential design. “I saw in my head this sky and the ground sprinkled with confetti, sprinkled with all this magical stuff that shimmered and expressed joy, excitement—expressed the goals of the Olympics,” designer Deborah Sussman told Los Angeles Magazine in 2014. That even extended to the bouquets of flowers handed to Olympians on the medal stands. Sussman insisted that local flowers take the place of conventional roses, so every medalist at the games ended up holding pointy, multi-colored bird of paradise flowers.

That same flower—the official flower of the city, no less—has been re-embraced for the main color palette of the 2028 Olympics, which is made up of the four colors: poppy, scarlet flax, bluebell, and sage brush. “It shows up in every neighborhood in LA, from the inner city to the hills to the beach to the desert. This thing can grow. It’s the grittiest thing you’ve ever seen. It could be two feet tall or 20 feet tall, and just thrives in any condition, which is such a great metaphor for the people that that make up this beautiful city,” Edwards says. “But also it’s just awesome to look at.”

Designed for broadcast

The LA28 design team worked closely with the Culver City office of Koto to translate the concept and bird of paradise color scheme into a more detailed design guidebook. Koto and the LA28 team developed four bespoke typefaces inspired by the hand-painted signage of L.A. strip malls, and consulted with LA28’s in-house athletes’f department to better understand how certain design approaches may or may not distract an athlete during an event.

Crucially, the team also made early contact with the Olympic Broadcasting Services, the official camera crew that captures all the Olympic event video that gets broadcast around the world. “Their point of view is the view that the world sees,” Engelhardt says. The designers consulted with them to better understand whether graphics they created would work onscreen or if color treatments on an event sideline would blur or vibrate when captured on video. “It’s very important for them to kind of understand our not only graphic direction, but our color direction. And it was quite frankly a surprise to us that those teams historically have not been brought into the creative process.”

Edwards says this kind of early consultation was done with a variety of stakeholders and partners with the intention of solving downstream problems before they become too costly or complicated to solve.

“This creative concept is the foundation for anything that’s created after. This will inspire the medals, this will inspire the torch, this will inspire the mascot,” he says. “If we’re not crossing every T and dotting every I when we’re thinking about this design system, it will fail when we need to do simple tasks like wrap a building or create fencing for a marathon.”

Designed for sponsors

The 2028 Olympics design approach also considers how its partners—particularly its sponsors—will be able to use these guidelines to aid their own preparations and brand activations ahead of the Olympics.

Engelhardt notes that Olympic organizing committees usually reveal the look and feel of their games about a year or so before the actual event, which doesn’t leave much time for partners like broadcasters and major sponsors to fall in line. As a result, these partners end up making their own visuals and physical sets, which can clash with the official design on the ground. “As a viewer, there’s a disconnect from what shows up on the field of play to what shows up in the broadcast partner’s animation. We want to eliminate that and have every partner show up whether on the ground or on broadcast in the same theme,” Engelhardt says.

LA28 revealed its look and feel to partners in early 2026. “We want 100% adoption. That’s a big part of why we developed the look with over two and a half years to the games,” Engelhardt says. “We want to get all of our stakeholder ecosystem excited about this so that they don’t have to worry about going off and creating something new. We want everybody to show up dressed for the party in ’28.”

This approach shows up most transparently in the official LA28 emblem, revealed back in 2020, which makes the “A” portion of the logo a variable that can be endlessly designed and redesigned by partner organizations. Edwards calls it “a big departure from traditional Olympic emblems,” and Engelhardt says “it has afforded us a ton of opportunity.”

Some critics have blasted this approach. “In LA28’s quest to have so many logos, now LA’s games have no logo,” writes design journalist Alissa Walker in her L.A. Olympics publication Torched. But, on the business side, the approach has already proven successful, with brands like Delta, Visa, and NBC making their own versions of the LA28 emblem. Many others are likely to follow in the next two years.

LA28’s design team is also hopeful this visual approach will extend further, with brands embracing the design guide and possibly even making their own LA28-inspired products and packaging ahead of the games, from superbloom soda cans to bird of paradise-colored clothing. “Our partners shouldn’t feel like outsiders during the games,” says Engelhardt. “We wanted to get our design elements into their hands with enough time for them to experiment.”

Image is increasingly important for this Olympics, which is facing a range of existential controversies, from LA28 chairman Casey Wasserstein’s salacious emails revealed in the files of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to the potential for politically motivated Olympic boycotts.

But even more important is business. By December 2025, LA28 reported that it had already inked deals for more than $2 billion in domestic sponsorship revenue, putting it on pace to be one of the most commercially successful Olympics in history. In multiple ways, this is by design.