Contacts:
Sarah Haun
Associate/Director of Marketing
& Communications
Two Twelve Associates, Inc
212 254 6670 x236
shaun@twotwelve.com

Lazaro Benitez
Media Relations Manager
NYC2012
646.587.5426
lbenitez@nyc2012.com

TWO TWELVE ASSOCIATES, NYC2012, OLYMPIANS, PARALYMPIANS, AND NEW YORKERS CELEBRATE “BID BOOK” SENDOFF
Five years of information design work culminates in 600-page submission to International Olympic Committee detailing New York’s plan for hosting the summer Olympic Games in 2012

NEW YORK, NY, 15 November 2004 -- Two Twelve Associates, the public information design firm, today announced that it has completed its graphic design work on NYC2012’s Candidature File ("Bid Book"), detailing New York City's plan for hosting the Olympic Games in 2012. As of today, NYC2012 has delivered the 600-page, 3 volume submission to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The occasion was marked with a gathering and Bid Book Relay on the Brooklyn Bridge attended by Governor George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on November 12, 2004.

"This project represents Two Twelve's unparalleled excellence in making the complex simple, the imagined real," says Two Twelve principal and project director Ann Harakawa. “In the course of our five year relationship with NYC2012 and its various creative partners, we have helped visualize the dream of bringing the Olympic Games to New York through graphic design.”

Two Twelve’s role in the project as graphic designers was to collect, coordinate, organize and visualize volumes of data and imagery pertaining to the NYC2012 bid plan. The Two Twelve team worked with NYC2012 to design hundreds of pages and knit them together in an elegant and informative fashion to build a compelling case for the New York bid. These included pictograms, environmental graphics, and sport renderings, with all information provided in both English and French. The design of dozens of maps and charts in particular required a keen sense of the bid goals and the IOC audience to emphasize the most important details and paint clear pictures of the plan.

Completion of this seminal project required collaboration with NYC2012’s continuously growing staff of marketers, urban planners and architects, writers, designers, and various executives, consultants and vendors.   In addition to integrating the English language content, Two Twelve also supervised the translation and proofreading of the document into French, an IOC language requirement.

“The IOC guidelines brought out the best of us as designers as we consolidated the core information and made it accessible to a wide audience,” says Two Twelve Associate Colleen Hall, the lead designer on the project. “In the end, this document is reviewed by the 120-plus IOC members who will literally hold New York’s future in their hands. Our task was to make that future look exciting, compelling, and most of all, real.”

Ms. Harakawa, Ms. Hall and their team of designers not only designed the IOC Candidature Files, but also similar documents that were submitted to the United States Olympic Committee in an earlier phase of the bid process, and helped New York win official Candidate City status in 2002.  In addition, Two Twelve has designed a variety of marketing communications, licensing guidelines, promotion pieces and logos for related events and outreach programs.

The official Host City for the Olympic Games in 2012 will be named on July 6, 2005. The IOC Evaluation Commission will visit each Candidate City in the Spring (New York: Feb. 21-24) to evaluate and review each city’s plan. New York City is competing for the right to host the Games in 2012 against counterparts in London, Madrid, Moscow and Paris.  

About Two Twelve
Two Twelve Associates is a leading graphic design firm specializing in public information design, the planning and presentation of complex information to diverse audiences. David Gibson founded Two Twelve in 1980, and he and his partner Ann Harakawa presently run the firm's New York City-based operation. Two Twelve offers a full range of services in print, interactive and environmental graphic design for corporate, institutional and municipal clients nationwide. Important commissions have included the design of signage and wayfinding systems for Shea Stadium, the Chicago Park District, the Yale University campus, and Rockefeller Center’s retail concourse. The firm also produces brand communications and environmental graphics for clients including the United States Census Bureau, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), Grand Central Terminal, and the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore.

About NYC2012
NYC2012 (http://www.nyc2012.com) is the committee leading New York’s bid to host the Olympic Games in 2012.

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