The original bid logo elegantly conflated the Tour Eiffel and the figures two and four. The Games logo was a bold flourish - no landmark Tour this time, but a trompe l’oeil which can be either a white Olympic flame in a dark cauldron or a foxy Parisian lady with dark hair and rosebud mouth.

In November there was another coup de theatre as Games organisers became the first to choose as their mascot, not a cuddly animal, nor even a masterpiece of an esteemed designer, but an ideal.

To be precise, the ideal of liberty, of freedom, symbolised since antiquity by the Phrygian Cap, as worn by Marianna in Eugene Delacroix’s celebrated and Louvre-domiciled painting celebrating the 1830 Revolution and entitled Liberty Leading the People.

Of course, these little Phyrges are cuddly and friendly iterations of the Cap; but still they have a serious intent.

And this week at the Paris 2024 headquarters in St Denis, the latest visual elements of the 33rd Summer Olympics were revealed; and were, again, uniquely striking.

Instead of pictograms, there will be "coats of arms" incorporating key elements of the different sports.

As for the general branding of the venues, there will be a move away from the predominant red presentational colour of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as the French capital prepares to deck itself in a palette of pink, blue and purple which, in terms of its forms, references styles such as Cubism and Pop Art.

The branding has been worked out in close consultation with the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), who wanted a different look for the stadiums.

The Stade de France, it was revealed, will have an overall purple look - with a purple track also.

But, for what organisers claim will be the first time, each different venue will be able to customise the main branding scheme.

Paris 2024 President Tony Estanguet sounded the keynote aspirations for the Games in terms of its broad visual impact as part of his involvement in Wednesday’s latest press conference.

"Paris 2024 will be all about highlighting the disciplines, athletes, host communities, celebration areas, in order to offer the conditions for a unique experience," he said.

"The look of the Paris 2024 Games serves this objective: it aims to invite people to party, to magnify the athletes, to sublimate the beauty of the gesture, to engrave in our memory exceptional technical performances and visually superb moments.

"The look is the identity of the Games, the forms and colours that adorn competition venues, cities and celebration areas for weeks.

"The look is what is seen on television by billions of viewers, what is perceived by the millions of spectators in the stands and celebration areas, what the media reports.

"The look is what should most simply and intuitively embody the spirit of an edition.

"At Paris 2024, we will have a look that invites you to party, thanks to a colourful design of our look that will also be its customisable dimension, so that each territory can appropriate it and truly feel the spirit of the Games.

"It is the decoration that will be used to dress every competition venue, together with the towns and celebration sites that will be decked out in the Games colours for several weeks.

"The Look of the Games will also ensure the spirit of the celebrations reaches all around the world. Every four years, the Olympic and Paralympic Games feature a new look reflecting the culture of the host country and the spirit that the latest edition of the Games wants to embody."

His theme was taken up by the Paris 2024 brand manager Julie Matikhine as she attempted to describe the "French spirit", saying: "We are the city of fashion, we are the country of love, the city of lights.

"Obviously, this very particular aesthetic, these graphics, this attention to detail, to colours, to line, have inspired everything we have been able to do.

"When we look at the brands that are ours and that you already know. The emblem of Paris 2024, the new brand of the French teams or even our mascots, they illustrate this desire for rupture, elegance and audacity at the same time…

"The emblem of Paris 2024 is a woman's face that embodies the biggest sporting event in the world. What audacity, what a cultural revolution! Who would have thought that France would put on a woman's face to carry French sport?...

"The look of the Games is the graphic and visual envelope in which the Olympic and Paralympic Games take place. Each edition of the Games has its own identity. Generally it transmits or embodies the values of the host country. It's very powerful, the look of the Games, because it's still the image that is associated with each sporting performance, with each highlight of the Olympic Games or Paralympic Games.

"We see this look behind all the performances on TV, behind all the images that journalists and then social networks will produce. It is part of the immaterial trace that the Olympic and Paralympic Games will leave behind."

Paris is the latest Olympic host city seeking to express itself in terms of its visual presentation - something that has become increasingly vital with the arrival of the television age.

From relatively plain beginnings - the Olympic rings symbol was not designed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin until 1912 - the Games took on increasing levels of themed decoration and branding awareness.

Joachim Roncin, Paris 2024 head of design, explained: "We necessarily worked on this idea of Pictos sport because it is a test that is still very important in the Olympic Games and in the graphic programme of the Olympic Games. It has always been a kind of playground for each edition, to reinvent the sports pictograms in the colours of each edition.

"So since 1964, approximately, there has been this creation of pictograms. It became a little official at that time with Tokyo and we find traces of other design around sport, that is to say sports illustration, from 1924. And so we wanted to break a little this literal pictograph representation thing...."

The ground-breaking graphic emergence of Tokyo 1964 was prompted by the need for Japan - which, through these Games, effectively reintroduced itself into global society following the Second World War - to speak to an international audience.

Given the complex nature of the Japanese alphabet, ahead of the first Olympics to be held in Asia, Tokyo’s graphic designers came up with an ingenious, unique graphic system that worked simply and clearly. Namely pictograms – pictures worth a thousand directions. 

After Tokyo, every Games has involved its own version of pictograms. There has also been an increasing focus on ensuring the setting for the sports action speaks of the hosts and showcases the action for actual and virtual spectators.

Kameka Yusaka, regarded as the father of Japanese graphic design, was the man who shaped the look of the first Tokyo Olympics with a streamlined, modernist vision.

He created the main logo for the Games, featuring a large red circle - referencing the Rising Sun of the Japanese flag and signifying a re-birth - on a white background above five interlinked golden rings and a gold, sans serif typeface reading: "Tokyo 1964". 

In 2021, while the postponed Tokyo 2020 Games were underway, Japan House London staged an exhibition entitled Tokyo 1964: Designing Tomorrow.

Simon Wright, curator and programme director, told itsnicethat.com: "The design of these Games influenced every international sporting tournament since, from the pictograms to the idea of a brand."

The policy involved a consistent use of Olympic colours and of typography.

Tokyo 1964 was the first international sporting event to use a coordinated set of pictograms devised to communicate with international visitors.

Artistic director Masaru Katzumie and graphic designer Yoshiro Yamashita pioneered the concept, creating 20 pictograms depicting particular sports and 39 others communicating information like where to find the toilets or first aid.

This created a new universal language that continued to thrive and evolve.

The sports pictograms of Mexico 1968 were clearly different from those of Tokyo 1964, olympicdesign.com writes.

"It was decided to represent each sport by depicting body parts and sports equipment that best represented the essence of the individual sport… each sport and all corresponding products such as posters, brochures, souvenirs, badges, decorations were given their own colour.

"This massively increased the recognition effect. For example, the cycling signposts, posters, regulations were all purple… all sports practised in the water had similar waves in the lower part of the pictogram."

Four years further on at the Munich Games, as itsnicethat.com explains, the pictograms designed by Otl Aicher owed their "streamlined aesthetic" to the Tokyo 1964 designs to become "perhaps the most globally recognised and used (such as the signs for men and women on public toilets)…"

A poster of Aicher's pictograms is part of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s collection in New York City, showing 166 pictograms, mainly conveying practical information like where to find stairs, bathrooms and transit.

It was part of a "Futures" exhibition that opened there in November 2021 exploring the capacity of new ideas and technologies to unite diverse groups of people in the way Aicher’s pictograms did.

Consulting curator Glenn Adamson told smithsonianmag.com that these pictograms have influenced signs such as those in airports and bus stations all over the world.

"It’s almost like Shakespeare," he said. "You can forget how innovative it was."

He added: "They were using modernism partly to express what good design is. But they were also very successfully, and quite literally, rebranding Germany."

Aicher, born in Ulm, Germany in 1922, was a close friend of Werner Scholl, whose family offered resistance to the Nazi regime. Aicher went on to marry Werner’s sister, Inge.

Two other Scholl siblings, Hans and Sophie, were leaders in the White Rose Society, one of the few non-Jewish youth resistance groups speaking out against the Nazis from inside Germany, and were executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets.

Aicher was arrested in 1937 after refusing to join the Hitler Youth. After being drafted into the Army to fight in the Second World War, he made several attempts at desertion.

Following the war, he co-founded the Ulm School of Design, which followed in the steps of the Bauhaus School of Design known for its functional, modernist art before it was shut down by the Nazis in 1933.

At a time when the world was struggling to come to terms with the Holocaust, these universal designs were a new way for Germany to express itself in contradistinction to the Fascist tendency of harking back to an imagined past of racial or national purity and using old-fashioned blackletter fonts to underline the point.

Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the museum, told smithsonianmag.com: "We look at it and go 'Oh, it’s so corporate.' But these principles aimed to be super-democratic and universal. It was like the opposite of fascist design."

Adamson commented: "Aicher comes in and he’s super-conscious about how to respond to the precedent of the '36 Olympics. Make the '72 Olympics totally different…

"The universalism he had in his mind actually did become universal in terms of graphic design."

In future Games designers have put different spins on the pictograms. At the Lillehammer 1994 Winter Olympics, they were based on 4,000-year-old Norwegian rock paintings found in a cave representing a skier.

Designers at the 2004 Athens Olympics and Paralympics drew upon Cycladic and Ancient Greek figures for their icons, and the Beijing 2008 Games also referenced ancient carvings.

Tokyo 2020 moved the pictogram revolution on still further by introducing the first animated versions in the Olympic history.

In terms of the overall look of the Games, similar strategies have been employed in recent editions.

At the London 2012 Games, for instance, four key "identity" colours were identified for branding in a particular effort to engage young people - pink, blue, green and orange.

However, the desire to honour Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th year on the throne caused purple to be the predominant colour for the main Olympic Stadium in Stratford and at other heritage venues.

This was also the reason why the Olympic medal ribbons were a royal purple colour.

Water-based sports such as aquatics, water polo and rowing took place in blue environments, while indoor and contact sports had venue colours of orange or magenta.

What colour is magenta exactly. Well here’s the definition of magenta: "Magenta is a colour that is variously defined as pinkish-purplish-red, reddish-purplish-pink or mauvish-crimson."

Hope that clears everything up.

As the wheel turns, the centrepiece to the Paris 2024 Games, the Stade de France in St Denis, will look not unlike the Olympic Stadium in Stratford did 12 years earlier as organisers revealed at the Paris press conference this week that it would have an overall purple look, and that the track would also be purple.

Doubtless, however, Paris 2024 will insist their purple track is nothing like the purple livery within the London 2012 stadium.