It is exciting to see the pictograms  be unveiled at the two-year countdown to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. The pictograms,which comprise 35 sport icons, are designed on the basic form of seal characters.

The seal character is considered one of the five forms of Chinese scripts. People used it for writing in ancient China,thousands years ago. However, it was abandoned and forgotten by most people soon, because of its complex strokes. Nowadays you can only see the seal characters in some special books, and few people have the ability to read them or use them for writing. As for me, I have learned some seal characters in the colleage, and always regard them with distinct aesthetic perception. Maybe it is quite inconvenient to use the seal character for communication in our daily life, but we should not abandon it overall, for it has become a cultural symbol actually. In another word, it should be remembered for its rich cultural connotations.

I admire the designers.They are so talented to show us such a wonderful inspiration, which integrates the charm of antient Chinese script with simplified embodiment of modern graphics.

Pictograms of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games released by BOCOG on Monday, August 7th, 2006

You can compare them with the seal characters below. The words are written as "奥林匹克  北京  二零零八" in modern Chinese script, which mean OLYMPIC BEIJING 2008.