Sound-off with Sinkoff
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Sound-off with Sinkoff
Episode #14: The "Look" of the Olympics
Brian Sinkoff interviews his uncle Mark Favermann, who designed the look of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and has been a design consultant for the Boston Red Sox for the past 23 seasons. Mark shares his experience of being selected to design the look of the Atlanta Olympics and the challenges he faced during the process.
He also discusses the importance of the look in creating a unique identity for the Olympics and how it helps to connect all the venues and events. They break down the Paris 2024 Olympics and how the logo connects back to the City.
Mark also talks about the future of the Olympics and the changing ways in which people consume sports content.
And hello and welcome everybody to Sound Off with Sync Off. I am Brian Sync Off. Of course, sound Off is sponsored by the Sync Off Realty Group, a full service real estate brokerage right here in the capital region of New York. Well, I am honored today to have a special guest on Sound Off with Sync Off. We're smack dab in the middle of the Summer Olympic Games in Paris, and who better to talk about these Olympics than my uncle you remember him as Uncle Fenway back in the day Mark Faverman here with us on Sound Off. Mark, welcome to the podcast, thank you.
Speaker 2:I'm honored to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Of course many remember Uncle Fenway, uncle Mark, back in the sound off days, back with us. Mark runs Favorman Design and I'll let you tell everyone a little bit about it. Mark, located in Boston, you have a very big sports background. Not only are you a sports fan, but your firm does a lot of work in the sports field.
Speaker 2:Well, we started off in the early 90s working on the World University Games in Buffalo and in Southern Ontario, and I did that work because I was really interested in working on the Olympics that were coming up in 1996 in Atlanta. I'll get back to that in a moment. We also have worked on NCAA Final Fours, the 1999 Rotter Cup bowl games in Florida, the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England, and for the past 23 seasons we have been a design consultant to the Boston Red Sox.
Speaker 1:That's how I became Uncle Fenway. So, Mark, when you say working on the games, tell everybody a little bit about what you're referring to.
Speaker 2:I'm trained as an urban designer, so I look at things visually from the top down, things visually from the top down, unlike a graphic designer who looks from small things up. So my purview or my perspective is somewhat unique and that's why I was selected to design the look, as they call it, of various sports projects. Now in 1993, projects Now in 1993, my then wife was at lunch with her mother and a former neighbor of ours said that she had just received a letter from the Atlanta Organizing Committee to submit her work. She was a graphic designer, but she said that wasn't her thing and it was more my thing. And let me let me, you know, let her send. At the time she faxed over the letter. I don't, I don't, I haven't used a fax in what 25 years anyway? Um. So I got the letter, I read it, um, and it asked for submission by Monday. And it was a Friday when I got the letter. I read it and it asked for a submission by Monday, and it was a Friday when I got it. In those days we would FedEx everything to make sure it could get there overnight. So I wrote out my background and I sent it to them and then about two or three weeks later I got another letter from them and it said you made the top 25 from the 481 firms that had applied. Wow, and so that was quite startling. That was quite, you know, startling. And then a little bit later I got another letter that said you're in the top 15 because my background fit what they wanted. So they invited me to come to Atlanta for an interview.
Speaker 2:So I had never done a project of that scale. I didn't really know what to do. Scale. I didn't really know what to do. So I asked a friend of mine who had worked in a large architectural firm if he had any suggestions of people I could meet who had taken on big projects and they could advise me. So I went to about five architects and I got nowhere. They were jealous that I had been invited to this. And the sixth one I went to, however, had a really good idea.
Speaker 2:For the previous 10 years or so, our firm had been designing shopping mall interiors, and so we did a lot of banners and, as you can see, at the Olympics there are banners. So he said to me do you have any? We had done, I don't know, 80, you know shopping centers and shopping malls. Rather, they were enclosed. And he said do you have any samples of these banners? And I said, yeah, we save one from every project. And he says, well, take 25 of them with you when you go to Orlando and unroll them Nobody's going to do that and show you what you've done. And then he also said your slides are good, tighten them up.
Speaker 2:And then I left out something. There was a fledgling cable sports company that worked on the World University Games in 1993. And I called them up in Connecticut and I asked them what it would cost to get the video, because they used my designs as segues between sports Right, they said something like six or seven hundred dollars. I couldn't afford that. So I was complaining to your mother, brian, about that. And she says, oh, there's no problem, I have it all on Betamax. So your mother sent me the video.
Speaker 2:So when I went to Atlanta, I walked into this room and the room looked like the Nuremberg trials. Nobody smiled. I didn't know. They didn't introduce themselves. I didn't know who the hell I was talking to, right? So I start presenting. So the first thing, I showed my slides of the all the shopping mall work that we had done, and then I, then I unfurled the banners and I had a video showing our segues from from um, the, the cable, uh, religion cable channel that was, by the way, named ESPN.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I walked out and there was this really nice lady who had escorted me in and out of the room and she turns to me and she says Mr Feverman, you're going to be called back. Maybe she made the decision, I don't know. I mean, I hadn't. They said nothing, they didn't applaud nothing. So, yeah, a couple of weeks later, I hear nothing. A month later, I hear nothing. So my ex-wife was certainly a negative person, so she kept hounding me You're not going to get it, you haven't heard. And she went away to New York for a few days and picked her up at the airport and she said, well, I guess you didn't hear anything. And I said, no, I did hear something. They invited me back. Wow. So I get rather emotional when I talk about it. So we were one of five firms from all over the United States who were chosen to design the Atlanta Olympics and it was the largest contract I had up until that time and and it was one of the best and worst experiences of my professional life.
Speaker 1:And why do you say that Well?
Speaker 2:let's let's look at some of the slide.
Speaker 1:Let's look at some of the stuff here. You got it on your screen here, right? Yes, I see it.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:So why was it? This is so. This is the stuff you did, right? Were we looking at all of that? Yeah, so those out there watching again, it's SoundOff with SyncOff.
Speaker 1:We're with Mark Faberman here. He is Faberman Design in Boston, designed the look of the Olympics in 1996. We're going to talk about the Paris Games here in 2024. But what I why I wanted to bring Mark on was because not only just how the whole process and the in-depth process of the Olympics it's obviously big preparation, from choosing the city to transportation, to hotels, to accommodations but also the look, because every Olympics I think it's fair to say, mark, when you think of Olympics I think you and I talked about this before this podcast Unlike anything else when I mention you know 1996, atlanta, I think of the Leaf, la. You know 1980, lake Placid, I think of like that bear right, that's sort of whatever the heck that I'm always thinking of the look of the games. When I hear the Olympics and I don't think you can say that about any other sporting event All the logos of every event sort of looks the same, but the Olympics have their own individual look, fair to say.
Speaker 2:But the Olympics have their own individual look Fair to say yes, and they also include the name of the host city and the date, so that if there's a sports event that they photograph, it is very unique to that event and that time and this is where I'm circling is really what you know I remember most about those games, that Atlanta 1996.
Speaker 1:So what was hard?
Speaker 2:is. We had to collaborate with five firms, so you can imagine all the egos in the room. And then the Atlanta people felt like they should have it alone and so they did everything they could to not necessarily help me in my group, but it's that type of thing but it was exhilarating. It also gave me a great confidence to take on any sports event afterwards, and I'm sure our long work with the Boston Red Sox was is a function of having worked on the Olympics in 96.
Speaker 1:So, mark, let's look at some other things from the Atlantic Games. Here, you know, you talked about sort of when there's the sporting event and you talked about how people you know remember the event. And here you go in the screen here with the cycling and you can see right here you can sort of see the look in the background. You know, everywhere you go it's let's face it it's your imprint. Mark, how, how, how cool is that, looking back now, at all these years later, that people still remember that look and that you were a big part of it?
Speaker 2:people still remember that look, and that you were a big part of it. Well, brian, I've thought of this as kind of macabre, but when I won this, I can say Olympic designer on my tombstone. So that's how cool it is. I mean, it's part of my professional life and me as a person.
Speaker 1:Now, here is Well, we'll go back, mark. Before we end the Atlanta games, I want to talk a little bit about sort of your inspiration, for where did you come up with this look?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's an iconic look, if you go back to an earlier slide, or the first one. Yeah, this one, that one. Yeah, the right side, and you can see the green pattern of it. I actually hand drew that and then it was interpreted into color. The idea is how this one right here yeah, it's called the quilt of leaves Wow, the one at the top in the middle.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, this one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the idea of it is that Atlanta is very lush and very verdant. There's a lot of trees and grass. In fact it was joked about that Dallas was Atlanta without any trees at one point, but anyway. So we had that in mind. We also were on the edge of Appalachia, and so quilts were a major craft of Appalachian women, and so we sort of connected the two to the southern Appalachians and to the green and flowers of Atlanta in the South. So that's where it came from.
Speaker 1:How many versions of that did you have to do before the Olympic Committee said, OK, we like it?
Speaker 2:They liked it right away, the first sketch.
Speaker 1:Really yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, everybody was sat in a room and we said sketch out something. And mine won and everybody took credit for it. But that's okay, I did that and I have the black and white version on my wall behind me. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. All right, mark, how you love. I mean, you're just a sports fan, you love the Olympics and I know you love watching these games, but how do you sort of correlate a look with the Olympics just because you're in it so deep?
Speaker 2:Well, I think some of them are quite bad and I write about them in articles. Paris is an exquisitely beautiful city. Period.
Speaker 2:Whatever you do to it it's not going to hurt it, but in this case they did a rather nice job with the colors and the design. A few other things are not so good, like the pictograms and the actual logo. These are all based on architecture or monuments in and around Paris, and so they have applied these graphics to each of the venues, all the sports venues. But that's another reason they do a look. Is they thematically connect all venues to each other, right?
Speaker 2:And on the metal, you go back to the metal. They did something really clever. They took a piece of the Eiffel Tower and that's in the middle of these medals and the Eiffel Tower piece is from repairs to the Eiffel Tower Over the years. They happened to keep the medal that they took down.
Speaker 1:Wow, isn't that cool. That is really cool. That is cool. So here are some shots as you more, of the city. This is Marseille.
Speaker 2:And so it's a seaside town and this is a, I guess, to get out of the heat, and it's pretty cool. That's a mirrored surface because the design is on the ground and that's reflected up.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, that is so cool. Yeah, there's a just a look kind of on the sand river.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and they. They put it as much as possible. As you know, at the opening ceremonies all the athletes came down on boats and barges, so you could see that behind the athletes. Pretty cool. That was cool and here's just a street here. You know better than me. Well, this is, I think, where the cycling and the marathon were.
Speaker 1:You like this? Look though this.
Speaker 2:Paris, look, I think it's pretty good. I mean, I think it's nice.
Speaker 1:There's the diving, yep, diving, diving. You could see there right the uh, you can see the name very strong.
Speaker 2:So, if you see, have a picture of it, that's in there mark now what I don't understand.
Speaker 1:you talked about how um you you always notice, you know the, the city and the year, but there's nothing on this backdrop that screams that's diving right.
Speaker 2:Oh, you know, behind the diver there would be on the outside, the exterior of the venue, there would be a pictogram.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, they're large.
Speaker 1:I see, and then this is track, track, track. I got it behind you here with the look sort of this would have been like your, you know, your, your leaf sort of branding, yeah okay, and then there's your gymnastics right behind you, sort of that same. Look, yeah, paris 24. They really really put it out there everywhere to see, don't they?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I think they did a rather nice job with the venues and they didn't have to build much because Paris has so many beautiful structures already. So LA is not going to build much either, by the way, that's in 2028, and they didn't build much in 1984 either.
Speaker 1:That was the sort of a big impact of visual application for the first time mark how, and I know you, uh, you know we, we talk about the look and we talk about, uh sort of the venues and the branding of the cities. How tough is it. One thing that fascinates me is how these cities bid. They bid on the Olympics. It's such a process. We know it's a little bit corrupt and crooked. In the years past it's certainly been.
Speaker 2:It's not a moneymaker either.
Speaker 1:No, it's not. They lose money, especially the cities that have to create things from scratch, correct? Yeah, how tough is it to get a bid?
Speaker 2:Sochi spent like $50 billion or something ridiculous $70 billion. It's gotten to the point, brian, that only one or two cities are even bidding on it per games now.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's that expensive and that commitment. Boston had won it somehow I don't know how, but somehow and their ideas were so the people in charge were so off the rails that they lost it. The state wouldn't fund it and the city wouldn't fund it, and they weren't secure enough to know that the corporations would come in and help them, but they wanted to focus it only on the city of Boston, so they wouldn't reach out to say Providence or even Albany or other places, because the smart Olympics spread it out. It's all over France, it's not just in Paris, right, and in Tahiti even they're doing surfing.
Speaker 2:Right. La has already said that some stuff is going to happen in Oklahoma City. They're not going to have it all in LA, right so. But Boston knew everything I tried to volunteer. They didn't let me.
Speaker 1:So when was when were they? Bidding which they were going to win this one.
Speaker 2:Twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, yeah, the summer of twenty four. Yeah, one 2024. Oh wow yeah, the summer of 24. They, yeah, the cities lose so much money and a lot of it is just because of the infrastructure. They have.
Speaker 2:Atlanta didn't lose any money, and and some of them don't, la won't lose any money, and and paris, I don't think spent a huge amount either, but paris is the number one tourist attraction in the world. I don't know if you knew that more people go there than any place else. So because it's so beautiful, um, but anyway it it's. It's interesting and complicated. The world cup is the other thing. That is um somewhat like this in terms of bidding by by cities and countries, so that's another aspect of it how do you think um, the future of the olympics are going to go mark, do you?
Speaker 1:do you think it's going to be? You know what it's always been, do you? I mean it's? It still gets crazy good tv ratings. I mean, everybody's talking about it, everybody seems to be watching it. They're not going away anytime soon are they?
Speaker 2:No I don't think so. Part of the issue or the problem is that the next generation doesn't necessarily watch things on television anymore. Right, they have gotten much more clever about how they're going to, um, how they've had been presenting things, how how they have been showing what's going on there on different forms. You know so. So you can go to Facebook or Tik TOK or um YouTube and you can see, you know almost immediately, things that have happened at the various Olympic venues.
Speaker 1:Mark, it is very interesting, I find it. And you brought me to my next point, and that is in the Olympics. You know, even going back to the 90s and the 2000s, these, you know, like Paris are, are five, six hours ahead of us. Right, right, it's five, is it five hours?
Speaker 2:six, six and six, so you know the swimming and the gymnastics happens in the afternoon.
Speaker 1:They show it on prime time at night. I've been finding that you we kind of already know who won. It's almost impossible to ignore it. I think for me, maybe the olympics have lost a little bit of luster, because I feel like at prime time I already know what's happened and I think that's hard to hide from. So I don't know how an Olympic sport like this, unless it's held in the United States, which it will be in a few years, how it remains fresh, because it just doesn't feel fresh to me.
Speaker 2:Right, well, it's even worse when it was in Tokyo, right.
Speaker 1:I mean 18 hours ahead, right 20,. What was it 18 hours ahead?
Speaker 2:Something like that. I mean it was crazy so. So in Sochi it was seven or eight hours ahead in Russia when they did the Winter Olympics Right, right, yeah, I mean no, it's a problem. But on the other hand, the more obscure sports that people don't ever see, like Greco-Roman wrestling, for instance, or speed climbing, or ping pong, ping pong, right, right, or badminton, or ping pong, ping pong, right Right, or badminton, or fencing, I mean it's kind of cool to see that stuff. So you know there is going to be something they can market Track and field and swimming, are you know? And basketball and volleyball.
Speaker 2:And gymnastics and gymnastics. Those are sort of the meat and potatoes.
Speaker 1:Well, personally, thelympics are my favorite. I did a podcast about a week ago and I said it seems as if the winter olympics were. Those sports were created on a dare you know, I mean your mother?
Speaker 2:dare you to say something really funny years ago. She said the winter olympics are sports that most people would never dare to do. Right, I mean, they would be frightened to even think about it.
Speaker 1:It's a dare. Yeah, I mean a bobsled going on a luge mogul skiing Like I dare you to do this. All right, let's create an Olympic sport.
Speaker 2:A slalom going as fast as you can on a mountain, right through the mountain.
Speaker 1:Right Through through, you know, through the gates. I just think the summer games sounds corny. Maybe they're a little pure and I I think one of the reasons why most people of any athletic level can relate to the summer games because, let's face it, we've all been in a pool. We've all, you know, most of us know how to swim.
Speaker 2:We've at least swam, We've run right.
Speaker 1:I mean I may not have thrown a javelin, but it's probably a lot easier to identify with that than mogul skiing. I mean, I wrestled, you wrestled.
Speaker 2:I've never fenced, but most of the other sports, they're kind of simple and pure, right. I mean, in terms of the summer games, yeah, they're clean to a certain extent, yeah, yeah, yeah, the track and field. To me in swimming, what you see is what you get. I mean, there's nothing other than what they do, and I like those a lot to watch.
Speaker 1:All right, mark, before we let you go, you mentioned you did a lot of work with the Red Sox. We want to show everybody your work because, whether you're a baseball fan, we got a lot of red socks fans here in the capital region, really all over a lot of yankee fans, and let's let's just face it, uh, fenway's an iconic ballpark, but let's talk a little bit about, uh, what it is you do with the Red Sox, so go ahead.
Speaker 2:I got a phone call from a guy named Sam who, in the end of 2021, and he said you're nearby, are you capable of doing this and this and this? And I said, yeah, we can do anything. We did the Olympics in 1996. What year was this? This is 2001. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:He was part of the new group that just bought Fenway and the Red Sox. Today he's Sam Kennedy and he's the CEO of the Red Sox. At the time he was a younger guy, anyway. So we over time started showing them how they could use the pads behind the batter that's always on television and the pads between the two dugouts, the two dugouts. And part of what we did was use some of the things we learned at the Olympics that when we were asked to sort of do corporate sponsorship things in a group, we would make sure that they all were the same color and the color we would use is white on a darker background. So we started to introduce them to the idea that we'll take Dick's Sporting Goods or we'll take National Car Rental and we'll not use their logo colors, but we'll put them white on Fenway Green. Fenway Green is what Fenway Park is painted in.
Speaker 1:This is what we're talking about right here.
Speaker 2:We used a mock-up to show our clients at Red Sox what it could look like on one of the temporary pads. Then eventually it was adopted and we did it in the dugouts and we did it in special areas where there's special seating, and this is what we've done for 23 seasons, and I have a crew that works part-time for me during the summer and they take care of all the changes and all the upgrades. About halfway through the summer we have to repaint a lot of stuff because it's abused by balls or kicks or whatever so, and so the major project that I was called about initially was to celebrate in some way or memorialize the um 9-11 tragedy, and so what we came up with was and you can show a picture of it the United States flag on the Green Monster. But it couldn't be a normal flag and it couldn't be in the normal shape of a flag. We had to use the dimensions that it had.
Speaker 2:So it's 200 feet long and 37 feet tall, and it's unfurled at opening day, all the holidays, Memorial Day, Labor Day, whatever July 4th if they're in town, and then during World Series or playoffs it's also unfurled. So that's in baseball history books and it's in the history of the game. We also have stuff like that we had done. Oh, that's a nice picture of it. We also did the tribute to, to, uh, ted williams and we used the green monster and people would walk by it and I don't know, pray for ted's body and cryovac, or whatever it is in he froze his body right um, let's show a little bit more here, mark, because I I just find it uh truly fascinating some of the stuff you've done, um, just at fenway and um, and things of that nature.
Speaker 1:So let's pull this up here for a sec. Um and mark, we get back to this now. How often are you like you said? You guys are over there. Are you over there? Are you over there like once a homestand? Are you over there? You know every other homestand Like, what is the?
Speaker 2:Several times during a homestand.
Speaker 1:And sponsorships change nightly.
Speaker 2:They could. Sometimes they're up two days, one day there we go.
Speaker 1:There's in uh dugout right. So this is all yours, the merrill at the top.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and we change that to Bank of America twice a summer and Merrill is a subsidiary of theirs.
Speaker 1:And what about the MLB? Do you do that too?
Speaker 2:and the Ford yes, and then there's Xfinity on the padding, yeah, and the Xfinity on the railings, and you know a lot of the details that we do.
Speaker 1:So, Mark, how are you doing this? You have a stencil that someone physically paints this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's physically painted. Wow, I have a lot of people who can do it, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's got to be kind of labor-intensive, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it ain't cheap to do it. I mean it's not a great fundraiser for me, but I got to get it done for them. And oh, by the way, like the Olympics, it's not like you can do it tomorrow. If you miss today, it ain't happening. You got to get it done so. So if there's a mistake, we have to go out there an hour or half an hour before a game and correct it.
Speaker 1:Here's Franklin, a mock-up for franklin right the batting gloves and mark this redsoxcom. Is you as well? Correct yes and the 99? These things are just rotating billboards so that's not necessarily you guys.
Speaker 2:we have permanent ones that we do at the beginning of the year that are bigger, and then the smaller ones are the changing ones.
Speaker 1:So, mark, that's gotta be fun for you, though, no, I mean how cool is that?
Speaker 2:I work on it almost daily. I can't tell you how much time I put into it, but it's a daily activity and I um send to the bosses, um, uh, pictures of everything as they're done. Yesterday I sent images of. I hope I haven't lost you, are you there?
Speaker 1:No, I'm here.
Speaker 2:Okay, I sent pictures of stuff that we had repainted to them and to the advertising agency for Bank of America so they could all see it together.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure they loved it. What's not to love?
Speaker 2:I'm thanked all the time about it. What's not to love? I'm thanked, you know, all the time about it.
Speaker 1:Well, awesome, mark. This is a first on my podcast having a member of my family, but well-deserved. Everybody knows Uncle Fenway from back in the Sound Office Sync Off radio days. And now he joins us back in the Sound Office here in the Sound Office Sync Off podcast moment. So, mark, thanks for joining us. We appreciate it. Always a pleasure. Love talking Olympics and the Red Sox with you.
Speaker 2:Always enjoy speaking about sports with Mr Sinkoff. All right, thank you.
Speaker 1:That's going to do it for this edition of SoundOff with Sinkoff. Make sure you check me out on YouTube, Spotify, all your places you can get podcasts. Give me a like, give me a subscribe and until next time, everybody, have a great day.
