Reflecting on her six years designing Olympics Games Paris 2024, Julie Matikhine says that not only was working on Paris 2024 “a once in a lifetime opportunity,” but it also reignited her own passion for a sport she left behind. 

 

A passionate equestrian as a child, she quit riding in university to focus on academics and her career. She went on to study law and began her professional journey working for the French National Railway Group (SNCF) as a strategic consultant. However, it wasn’t long before she felt pulled in a different direction. 

 

“I felt very quickly that I missed something about my creativity, about my particular mindset to always search for innovation, and at the SNCF this was not possible,” she says. “So I jumped into a new universe!” 

 

The new universe in question was communications, and for more than 25 years Julie Matikhine has applied her creative vision to global brand strategy, taking a holistic approach to each project. 

 

“I consider brands as a whole,” she explains. “It’s not only a question of design, it’s not only a question of branding, of signs, but it’s a question of content, forms and storytelling. To me, my job is done if I can touch both the content and the form.” 

 

She began working on the Paris Olympic Games in 2018, which presented a diverse set of challenges, among them what she refers to as “ephemeral marketing.” That is, quickly building a strong brand that will disappear not long after its inception. 

 

“You don’t have time to establish a long-term story, to assimilate people to your culture, your environment,” she says. “You need to go straight and strong.” 

 

To accomplish this, she opted to develop powerful symbols to immediately create a connection with people. 

 

Every brand element her team has developed for the Olympic and Paralympic Games — from the soft colours to the coat of arms-style pictograms to the quirky, red mascot — has a special significance, but the core brand vision for Paris 2024 is consistent throughout. The vision, “sport can change everything,” seeks to adjust the country’s attitude toward athletic pursuits, she says.  

 

“In France, the culture of sport is not that good,” she explains. “We have a global culture of sport being leisure, of being something to do ‘when I have time’ and of being not a good idea if you want to perform in university or high school.” 

 

“The mission we gave to the Games was to demonstrate that we [France] are wrong.” 

 

According to Julie Matikhine, the Olympic Games Paris 2024 logo depicting the face of the woman was the first creative expression of the vision. 

 

The Paris 2024 logo combines three elements, a medal, the Olympic flame and a woman’s face that represents the country’s ideals of liberty and equality.  ​

 

“The emblem is a fusion of symbols — the shape of the medal, the shape of the flame, and together they create the shape of a woman.” 

 

With its sleek bob, the emblem could be mistaken for a sketch of a 1920s-era flapper, but the female face is in fact a symbolic representation of a guardian figure, which — like the female figures representing justice, liberty, or the republic in France — ensures the rightful place of sport in our society. The goal, Julie Matikhine explains, was to raise sport to the level of universal ideals.   

 

“We wanted to convey that sport is a universal value as important as justice, as liberty, as freedom,” she says. 

 

Elevating sport to a universal value was also behind the creation of the atypical Paris 2024 mascot, which, at first glance, resembles a bipedal triangle. 

 

“It could have been a French cat or a pigeon, but what would have been the meaning behind it?” she asks. “There wouldn’t have been any.” 

 

Instead, she opted for Phrygian caps, the conical hats associated with the French Revolution. 

 

“It’s the symbol of a population fighting for progress,” she says. “And in France, we’ve had several revolutions.” 

 

The caps, she adds, beckons people to follow the new French Revolution that the Games should provoke, which is “the revolution of sport.” 

 

Revolution may be synonymous with the history of City of Light, but so is beauty and style, and Julie Matikhine believed it was essential to add a bit of French flair into the Games’ visual identity. 

 

“I was obsessed with the aesthetic dimension of the brand,” she says. “And believe me, it is not easy to perform the signs, the logos, the whole look of the Games with this obsession with aesthetics and beauty, because people are not quite used to that in this universe.” 

 

To infuse a bit of French chic into the event, she drew inspiration from the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics. 

 

During that time, the Art Deco movement had burst onto the scene, and its sleek, symmetrical lines and geometric forms revolutionised the design world.

 

The visual identity of the Games is rooted in the Art Deco style, which was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. There are numerous classic Art Deco buildings in Paris, including the Rex cinema.

 

Julie Matikhine says she and her team were attracted to the movement’s simple shapes and “strong convictions.” 

 

“We created a temporal gate between 1924, when the summer Olympics came in Paris for the last time, and today,” she says.  

 

“They reject conventions and right angles, and they favour the combination of dissimilar materials,” she continues. “For example, 100 years ago, it was very surprising to mix marble and exotic wood.” 

 

The Olympic Games Paris 2024, she adds, are also mixing disparate elements, such as sport and fashion and the current design of the signage, logo and other branding has adopted a modernised Art Deco style.   

 

The colours for the visual design were also carefully chosen, with blue paying homage to the city’s zinc rooftops and green evoking the cupola of the Opera Garnier. The pink in the colour scheme can be traced back centuries when it was associated with the power of the king. The power it signifies in the context of the Games, she explains, is “the power of sport brings you to the stadium.” 

 

A selection of the coat of arms-style pictograms designed for the 2024 Olympic Games.

 

For the Olympic torch design, Paris 2024 turned to French designer Mathieu Lahanneur, who created a sleek, elegant torch with rippled steel that mimics the Seine River. The symmetry of the torch, she says, is a way to celebrate gender equality. Indeed, Paris 2024 marks the first Games in which an equal number of male and female athletes will be competing. 

 

Another local collaboration was with Chaumet, the luxury jewellery brand that was established in the late 18th century. The first jeweller to do so, Chaumet designed and created the 2024 Olympic medals, even embedding a small piece of iron scrapped from the Eiffel Tower in the centre of each. 

  

Whatever her next career move may be, Julie Matikhine acknowledges that her work designing the Olympic Games Paris 2024 will always have a special significance.  

 

“Perhaps I will work again for a different organizing committee, but being French and doing that in France when you know it happens once a century, makes it so different from any other,” she says. 

 

Her position with Paris 2024 also inspired her to return to riding. 

 

“I was explaining to everyone that sport can change everything, and I said to myself ‘look, you need to start again!’” 

 

Three years ago she did just that, and today she continues to compete in shows around France with her horse Evita. 

 

“It has a very important place in my life,” she says of equestrianism. And such passion and respect for sport, she believes, “is the perfect illustration of what Paris 2024 wants to deliver to the world.” 

 

Julie Matikhine will participate in Business of Design Week 2024 in Hong Kong from 4 to 6 Dec to share more insights on designing for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games.