Paris 2024's visual identity campaign Designing Paris 2024, created by W Conran Design, earned a Black Pencil at D&AD 2025 for redefining Olympic spatial
ARCHIVEParis 2024 Designing Paris How Cobblestones Became an Olympic Identity
Designing Paris 2024 is the comprehensive visual identity programme created by W Conran Design for COJOP — the Comité d'Organisation des Jeux Olympiques et Paralympiques de Paris 2024 — deploying a modular graphic system inspired by Parisian cobblestones across every touchpoint of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in France, from venue signage and fan zones to volunteer uniforms and airport installations.
The campaign is not a single advertisement but a retrospective articulation of a design endeavour that unfolded over approximately four years, according to Clapboard. W Conran Design — the combined entity of Conran Design Group and W&Cie — was commissioned to construct a visual system capable of functioning across an extraordinary breadth of surfaces and contexts without relying on the conventional postcard imagery that has characterised Olympic branding for decades. The result was a language built from the pavé, the irregular cobblestone that defines the streets, squares, and public life of Paris, transformed into a modular, scalable unit that could adapt to any format while remaining unmistakably French and unmistakably contemporary.
In France, the Games represented far more than a sporting event. Paris 2024 was positioned as a cultural and civic statement, placing design at its operational centre rather than treating it as an aesthetic afterthought. The Designing Paris 2024 identity touched venues, streets, airports, fan zones, and the clothing worn by tens of thousands of volunteers across the host nation. Published in campaign archives in May 2025 and submitted to the industry record by LLLLITL, the work sits at the intersection of ambient, design, and experiential media — categories that reflect its refusal to be confined to any single channel or surface. Clapboard has assigned this campaign a score of 79 out of 100, recognising its structural ambition, cultural precision, and award-validated craft.
W Conran Design identified a clear strategic problem at the outset of the Paris 2024 identity project. Every major host city faces the same temptation: to reach for its most recognisable monuments and export them wholesale onto Games branding. Paris, perhaps more than any city on earth, carries the weight of that temptation — the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, Haussmann boulevards. The agency's core strategic decision was to refuse that shortcut entirely.
Instead, the design team turned to the pavé — the cobblestone — as the foundational unit of a modular visual language. This choice was simultaneously archetypal and unexpected. The pavé is omnipresent in Parisian public space, embedded in the streets of Montmartre, the courtyards of the Marais, and the plazas surrounding the very venues that hosted competition. Yet it had never been elevated into a primary design language for a major international event. By abstracting the cobblestone into a geometric, modular system, W Conran Design created a mark that could scale from a postage-stamp credential badge to a multi-storey stadium wrap without losing coherence, according to documentation cited by Clapboard.
The sports and experiential design sector in France has grown increasingly competitive in the years surrounding Paris 2024, with international agencies including Landor and Saffron Brand Consultants active across European sporting identity briefs. Against this backdrop, the choice to anchor the Paris 2024 identity in a specifically local, textural reference rather than an internationally legible icon gave the work a quality of cultural authenticity that purely typographic or illustrative systems rarely achieve. The campaign's classification across hospitality, tourism, recreation, leisure, and sports reflects the breadth of the brief: this was not a logo exercise but a total environmental design system, built to function as infrastructure across an entire host nation during the most scrutinised weeks of France's recent public life.
Designing Paris 2024 assembled a large and precisely structured creative team inside W Conran Design. Executive creative director Thierry Reboul led the programme at its highest level, working alongside creative directors Gilles Deléris and Jean-Jacques Charrais, according to documentation published by Conran Design Group and corroborated by Luerzers Archive. Design direction was held by Joachim Roncin, whose role in translating the pavé concept into a deployable modular system was central to the project's operational viability.
Art direction across the programme was handled by a team of five: Valentin Godfroi, Delphine Rougerie, Florence Vitu, Célyne Parizel, and Peio Ospital, as listed by Conran Design Group. Senior designer Axel Leclerc contributed to the refinement of the system, while producers Ana Casagrande and Felipe Silvani managed the logistical complexity of deploying a unified identity across venues, streets, airports, fan zones, and volunteer uniforms simultaneously throughout France, per documentation sourced from llllitl.fr.
The production challenge alone distinguishes this work from conventional campaign craft. A visual identity that must function as ambient signage in a public square, as experiential installation in a fan zone, and as wearable design on a volunteer uniform is not a static system — it is a living one, requiring decisions about material, scale, colour behaviour, and legibility under conditions that range from the controlled environment of a stadium to the uncontrolled light of a Parisian summer street. The pavé-derived modularity proved equal to that challenge. Each component of the system retained its relationship to the whole regardless of context, delivering the coherence that large-scale international events demand without sacrificing the local specificity that gave the identity its character. The creative and production documentation for Designing Paris 2024 is recorded across conrandesigngroup.com, llllitl.fr, and red-dot.org.
ARCHIVEDesigning Paris 2024 earned a Black Pencil at D&AD 2025 in Spatial Design, according to D&AD. The Black Pencil is D&AD's highest honour, awarded only when judges reach unanimous agreement that a piece of work represents a genuine and lasting contribution to creative excellence — a threshold that is frequently unmet entirely in a given year. For a Games identity programme to reach that standard is itself a measure of the work's structural and cultural achievement.
The campaign's award record extends beyond that single recognition. Designing Paris 2024 received two Bronze Pencils at D&AD 2025 in Graphic Design, according to D&AD, and at The One Show 2025 it earned a Merit in Spatial Design, Experiential and Immersive, a Bronze in Experiential and Immersive, and a Bronze in Integrated and Omnichannel, as reported by The One Show. That spread across spatial, graphic, experiential, and integrated categories reflects a campaign that did not win narrowly on one dimension of craft but performed at an elevated level across the full scope of its ambition.
No specific audience reach figures, impression counts, or commercial performance metrics for Designing Paris 2024 are publicly available as standalone campaign data. The Games themselves were broadcast and attended at a scale befitting a Paris Olympics, but those figures belong to the event rather than to the identity programme specifically. What the award record establishes with verifiable clarity is that within the creative industries — among the jurors most qualified to assess spatial design, graphic systems, and experiential work — Designing Paris 2024 achieved the highest possible recognition. For a campaign operating across the hospitality, tourism, recreation, leisure, and sports sectors of France during one of the country's defining public moments, that jury verdict carries considerable weight. Clapboard scores this campaign 79 out of 100.
Designing Paris 2024 is the comprehensive visual identity programme built for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. W Conran Design — the combined entity of Conran Design Group and W&Cie — created it for COJOP, the official organising committee, over approximately four years, deploying the system across venues, streets, airports, and volunteer uniforms throughout France.
W Conran Design built the Paris 2024 identity around the Parisian pavé — the cobblestone. This modular visual language, abstracted from the stone units found across Paris's public spaces, was scalable across every format and surface, from credential badges to stadium wraps, without relying on conventional Olympic postcard imagery such as the Eiffel Tower.
Designing Paris 2024 won a Black Pencil at D&AD 2025 in Spatial Design, according to D&AD. The campaign also received two Bronze Pencils at D&AD 2025 in Graphic Design. The Black Pencil is D&AD's highest honour, awarded only when judges unanimously agree a work represents a lasting contribution to creative excellence.
Designing Paris 2024 earned three recognitions at The One Show 2025, according to The One Show: a Merit in Spatial Design, Experiential and Immersive; a Bronze in Experiential and Immersive; and a Bronze in Integrated and Omnichannel. That spread across multiple categories reflects the campaign's coherent performance across spatial, experiential, and integrated disciplines.
Thierry Reboul served as executive creative director on Designing Paris 2024, with Gilles Deléris and Jean-Jacques Charrais as creative directors, according to Conran Design Group. Design direction was held by Joachim Roncin. Five art directors — Valentin Godfroi, Delphine Rougerie, Florence Vitu, Célyne Parizel, and Peio Ospital — contributed alongside senior designer Axel Leclerc.
Clapboard assigns Designing Paris 2024 a score of 79 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's structural ambition, cultural precision, and a verified award record that includes a D&AD Black Pencil and multiple recognitions at The One Show 2025 across spatial, graphic, experiential, and integrated categories — a range that confirms consistently high creative performance.
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