Youth Olympic Medal Design 2024

Gold medal concept for the Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Olympic Games, entered in the IOC’s open medal design competition (March 2023). Vector artwork split into material masks and rendered as engraved gold in Blender; the entry lives in the competition’s public gallery.

The Olympics ran an open call: anyone, anywhere could design the front of the real Gangwon 2024 medal. Obviously I entered.

Timeline: Deadline day, 8 Mar 2023 - the template had been waiting since 2 Feb
Brief: Obverse of the official Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Olympic medal, via the IOC’s open competition
Rules: A perfect circle, the Olympic rings untouched, no words except “Youth Olympic Games”
Mine: Concept, vector artwork, material maps, 3D renders
Result: Entry #2685, live in the IOC’s public design gallery

The brief was nearly all constraints. You design the front only, the Organising Committee keeps the back. It must be perfectly circular with nothing cut off the edge. The Olympic rings must appear in their pure form, unaltered. The only text allowed is Youth Olympic Games. Inside that circle: anything you can defend.

I downloaded the official template on February 2. Then every single file in this project - the line art, three Blender files, ten renders, the submission itself - is stamped March 8. Deadline day. The whole medal happened in one long push, which, given what it ended up being about, feels correct.

The artwork: every line in the medal fights its way toward the same bright point.

I called it “What you and I and the whole world can become”. The story of the design, exactly as I wrote it in the submission that night:

“There are a lot of interpretations that can be found in the design. To some, it might seem like a mountain to climb on their way to the goal (wink wink: reference to the location). To some, it can look like a tree (imagine the circle to be the canopy of the tree and the star-like shape to be the trunk with branches) with very deep roots - akin to the player who stands in the arena. S/he does not stand alone, they stand there because of the support of their friends, family, coaches and everyone back at their roots. But to me personally, it’s the fight against setbacks and failures and anything that might come your way. It’s the “pushing through” to create something you believe in, and reaching the moment everything clicks. The moment, you touch the perfection of the universe. Fun fact: Sunlight also has the same struggle. It takes sunlight 50,000 years to reach from the sun’s core to the surface. And then it shines - so brightly that it becomes unstoppable, the fastest thing in the universe.”

my submission statement, 8 March 2023

Making it feel like metal

A flat vector is not a medal. To get one, the Illustrator file got split into grayscale masks - one for where the metal shines, one for where it dents, one for where it roughens - and Blender read them as materials, engraving the artwork into gold. The exports tell you how it went: SHINY, SHINY 2, SHINY 3, SHINY 4, SHINY FINAL.

Three-panel process strip: the grayscale shine mask exported from Illustrator, an early Blender test render of a mostly blank gold disc with only partial engraving, and the final render with the full artwork engraved and catching light — Left to right: the shine mask painted in Illustrator, the first Blender test (a proud blank coin), and the final render.

The render that sold it to me: engraved lines catching light like struck metal.

Where it landed

I uploaded the biggest file the rules allowed, 1000 by 1000 pixels, clicked through the IOC’s two confirmation emails, and the design went live in the competition’s public gallery with my name and statement beside it. The medal that went to Gangwon in January 2024 was someone else’s design. Mine stayed in the gallery, which honestly still feels like a medal.

the submission file is literally named yayy.png