The Beijing Olympics Pictograms, issued on August 7, 2006, are called “the Beauty of Seal Characters.”

The pictograms comprise 35 sports icons, respectively representing athletics, rowing, badminton, baseball, basketball, boxing, canoe/kayak flat-water, canoe/kayak slalom, cycling, equestrianism, fencing, football, artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, trampoline, weightlifting, handball, hockey, judo, wrestling, swimming, synchronized swimming, diving, water polo, modern pentathlon, softball, taekwondo, tennis, table tennis, shooting, archery, triathlon, sailing, court volleyball and beach volleyball.

A rubbing lifted from an ancient bronze artifact, a design element of the newly issued sport signage for the Beijing Games

The Beijing 2008 Olympics is to feature a total of 37 events within 28 major sports categories. It was agreed that three cycling events would be represented by a single icon, so 35 sports pictograms were issued.

As one of the basic image elements of the Olympic Games, the pictograms are used for signage and decorating of venues. Primarily the images will serve as directional signposts for Olympic athletes as well as spectators. They are also widely applied to purposes of advertising and communications, TV broadcasting, souvenir design, Olympic marketing and more.

Designers revealed that they used as a basis for the pictograms the strokes of traditional Chinese seal characters. Chinese seal characters are round and smooth, rough and gentle, beautiful and graceful, and they demonstrate the quintessence of traditional Chinese aesthetics. They also borrowed the effect of sharp contrast of black and white from the typical Chinese traditional artistic form of rubbings.

The pictographic inspirations were drawn from a rubbing from Maogong tripod caldron of the 9th century BC and the rubbing from a Sanshi bronze plate of the 8th century BC. For instance, the human figure on the horseback represented by the equestrian icon is just the character of “man” in traditional Chinese pictographic seal script. And the image of the horse in that same pictogram is transformed from the seal character that represents the animal.