Starbucks will pay about $35 million to more than 15,000 New York City workers to settle claims it denied them stable schedules and arbitrarily cut their hours, city officials announced Monday.
The company will also pay $3.4 million in civil penalties under the agreement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. It also agrees to comply with the city’s Fair Workweek Law going forward.
A company spokeswoman said Starbucks is committed to operating responsibly and in compliance with all applicable local laws and regulations in every market where it does business, but also noted the complexities of the citys law.
This [law] is notoriously challenging to manage, and this isnt just a Starbucks issue. Nearly every retailer in the city faces these roadblocks, spokeswoman Jaci Anderson said.
Most of the affected employees who held hourly positions will receive $50 for each week worked from July 2021 through July 2024, the department said. Workers who experienced a violation after that may be eligible for compensation by filing a complaint with the department.
The $38.9 million settlement also guarantees employees laid off during recent store closings in the city will get the chance for reinstatement at other company locations.
The city began investigating in 2022 after receiving dozens of worker complaints against several Starbucks locations, and eventually expanded its investigation to the hundreds of stores in the city. The probe found that most Starbucks employees never got regular schedules and the company routinely reduced employees hours by more than 15%, making it difficult for staffers to know their regular weekly earnings and plan for other commitments, such as child care, education, or other jobs.
The company also routinely denied workers the chance to pick up extra shifts, leaving them involuntarily in part-time status, according to the city.
The agreement with New York comes as Starbucks union continues a nationwide strike at dozens of locations that began last month. The number of affected stores and the strike’s impact remain in dispute by the two sides.
Cat Murphy, a college student, has wanted to be a journalist since she was 11. Many of her friends don’t understand why.
When they engage with the news if they do they hear a cacophony of voices. They don’t know who to believe. Reporters are biased. They make mistakes. Besides, why would you hitch your future to a dying industry?
There is a lot of commentary Oh, good for you. Look what youre walking into. You’re going to be screaming into the void. You’re going to be useless,’ said Murphy, a 21-year-old graduate student at the University of Maryland’s journalism school.
She is undeterred. And it’s also why she’s not surprised by the findings of a study this fall that documented negative attitudes toward the news media among 13- to 18-year-old Americans. The press rarely fares well in surveys of adults, but it’s sobering to see the same disdain among people whose opinions about the world are still forming.
Words to describe the news media today
Asked by the News Literacy Project for one word to describe today’s news media, 84% of teens responded with something negative biased, crazy, boring, fake,” bad,” depressing, confusing, scary.
About half of the teens surveyed believe journalists give advertisers special treatment, make up details such as quotes, or pay or do favors for sources always or almost always or often, and about 6 in 10 say journalists regularly take photos and videos out of context. About one-third or less believe that reporters correct errors when they happen, confirm facts before reporting them, gather information from multiple sources or cover stories that help protect the public interest at least often practices ingrained in the DNA of reputable journalists.
To some degree, teens reflect the attitudes they’re exposed to, particularly when the most prominent politician of their age has made fake news a mantra. Experts say few teens follow news regularly or learn in school about the purpose of journalism.
Journalists don’t help themselves with mistakes or ethical lapses that make headlines. Opinionated reporters or commentators in an era of political division make readers wonder what to believe.
Some of this (attitude) is earned, but much of it is based on misperception, said Peter Adams, senior vice president of research and design for the Washington-based News Literacy Project.
Never picking up the news habit
There are ways to turn things around, but it will take work.
Many of Lily Ogburn’s classmates get their information from social media. Their parents didn’t watch or read news reports as they grew up, so they didn’t pick up the habit, said Ogburn, a senior at Northwestern University’s journalism school.
Ogburn is the former editor-in-chief at the well-regarded Daily Northwestern student newspaper. The newspaper’s 2023 reports on alleged hazing and racism within the school’s football program led to the ouster of its coach. Still, she found some students don’t understand the newspaper’s role; they believe it exists to protect people in power rather than hold them accountable.
She frequently had to explain what she did to classmates. There’s a lot of mistrust toward journalists, she said. But it has firmed her resolve to stick with the profession.
I want to be a journalist that people trust,” Ogburn said, and I want to report news that makes people believe and trust in the media.
The news industry’s financial troubles over the past two decades have hollowed out newsrooms and left fewer journalists on duty. Along with not seeing much legitimate journalism, young people frequently don’t experience it through popular culture unlike a previous generation, which learned in detail how Washington Post reporters Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal in the Academy Award-winning movie All the President’s Men.
When the News Literacy Project asked, two-thirds of teens couldn’t think of anything when asked what movies or TV shows came to mind when they think about journalism. Those who had answers most frequently cited the Spider-Man franchise or the movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.” Neither portrayal was particularly flattering.
Upon retiring as editor of Newsday, Howard Schneider helped develop the State University of New York system’s first School of Journalism. But instead of teaching future writers, editors or producers, he became drawn to teaching non-journalists about being news consumers.
Now the executive director of SUNY Stony Brook’s Center for News Literacy, Schneider wasn’t surprised about any of the recent survey’s findings, either.
The negativity, the feeling that news is biased, is just a reflection of how their parents feel, Schneider said. The more exposed to news, legitimate news, the more their attitudes turn positive.
He has developed news literacy programs for school districts. Students will say, I get my news from YouTube, he said. I say, ‘No, you don’t,'” and explains where the news originates and how to be discerning about what they see.
Lessons from a news literacy class
That’s one of the lessons that 16-year-old Brianne Boyack has taken from her course in news literacy at Brighton High School in Cottonwood Heights, Utah. She had little trust in news going in, but has learned the importance of double-checking sources when she sees something interesting and seeking outlets she’s found reliable.
Her classmate, Rhett MacFarlane, applied what he learned in class to investigate when a friend told him the Louvre was robbed in Paris.
I’ve learned that there is definitely fact-checking (in journalism), MacFarlane, also 16, told The Associated Press. You guys are professionals and you have to tell the truth or you’d be fired. I thought you guys just did whatever you wanted and chose what to say about a topic.
Still, news literacy programs in schools are relatively rare. Schools already have a lot of subjects to cover to prepare students for the future. And, remember, journalists don’t have the best reputations. It can be hard for educators to stick their necks out for them.
There’s an inertia here, Schneider said, and this is an urgent issue.
At the University of Maryland, Murphy said she didn think there was an inherent hatred toward journalists among her fellow students. They dont have any experience reading journalism, she said.
That’s where she sees the journalism industry needing to make more of an effort. One of the things she finds most frustrating about her chosen field is a resistance to change, particularly an unwillingness or inability to make meaningful use of social media.
Theres very little movement in the direction of going to where people are, as opposed to expecting them to come to where you are, Murphy said. The only way to turn it around is going to be to switch to doing things that captivate people today, as opposed to captivating people 20 years ago.
David Bauder, AP media writer
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While national active inventory is still up year-over-year, the pace of growth has slowed since summer as some home sellers have thrown in the towel and delisted their properties. Indeed, according to Redfin, U.S. delistings as a share of inventory recently ticked up to 5.5%a decade-high reading for this time of year.
Looking ahead, in markets seeing the biggest jumps in delistings right now, many of those listings will likely return to the resale market in spring 2026or test out the rental market. Without a corresponding increase in housing demand, that could lead to a faster-than-expected acceleration in inventory growth.
More sellers are giving up because their homes have been sitting on the market for a long time, and they dont want to or cant afford to settle on accepting a low price,” says Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin. Many homes have a sticker price higher than buyers are willing to pay, but many sellers are unwilling to negotiate. When tens of thousands of homeowners pull their homes off the market rather than accept a low offer, it effectively reduces the supply of homes that are actually available for buyers.
Of course, theres wide regional variation in delistings. Weaker and softer housing markets in places like Texas and Florida are currently seeing a higher share of delistings. Meanwhile, tighter housing markets in the Midwest are seeing a lower delisting rate.
Many homeowners who bought during the pandemic demand frenzy still expect sky-high prices,” says Khan. “They remember a sellers market, so theyre hesitant to yield to buyers who want to negotiate the price down and/or ask for concessions. Recent buyers are also more likely to be testing the market; maybe they would sell and move up to a bigger home in a more desirable neighborhood if they get the price they want, but otherwise theyd stay put. Longtime owners, though, are more motivated to selltheyre often downsizing or relocating for retirement.
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The housing markets with the highest level of delistings are also the same places with the most “stale” inventoryhomes that have been on the market for over 60 days.
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Roughly one in five homes that were delisted over the summer were re-listed within three months: 20% of homes that were pulled off the market in July were subsequently re-listed, as were 18% of homes that were pulled in June,” writes Redfin. “Were including this metric because delisting is sometimes used as a selling strategy; some sellers take their homes off the market and subsequently relist at a lower price to avoid house hunters seeing a ‘price drop’ on their listing, and to reset the number of days their home has been on the market.”
“Note that were looking at delistings over the summer rather than September to ensure that enough time has passed to determine whether a home was re-listed,” Redfin adds. “Of the homes that were delisted in July then put back on the market, 31.6% of them have sold.
New York City is poised to get its first Vegas-style casinos, including one next to the home stadium of baseballs New York Mets and another that could see a windfall for President Donald Trump.
They were among three casino proposals approved for lucrative gambling licenses on Monday by a key state panel. No casinos will end up coming to Manhattan, however, as several other competing proposals were already scrapped, including one in the heart of Times Square.
The state Gaming Commission is expected to formally issue the licenses before the end of the year, as the gambling revenues are already factored into the state budget. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul said the casinos promise to unlock billions of dollars in funding for the states transit system.
Ballys plan to spend $4 billion building a casino at the Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx could mean millions of dollars for Trump. When the company purchased the city-owned golf course’s operating rights from the Trump Organization in 2023, it promised to pony up another $115 million if it won a casino license. Spokespersons for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
In nearby Queens, billionaire New York Mets owner Steve Cohen has proposed building an $8.1 billion Hard Rock casino on a parking lot of Citi Field. The complex would include a performance venue, a hotel, and a retail and shopping space.
Resorts World, meanwhile, has proposed investing more than $5 billion to expand an existing slots parlor into a full casino at the Aqueduct Race Track, which is also in Queens, near John F. Kennedy International Airport. It, too, would add hotel, dining, and entertainment options.
Vicki Been, chair of the New York Gaming Facility Location Board, said the panel believed the New York City market was plenty strong enough to sustain three casinos, despite their proximity.
She said the three projects would generate roughly $7 billion in gambling revenues over a 10-year span. The projects would produce more than $5 billion in other tax revenues and other community benefits, including public safety investments and public transit and roadway improvements, Been said.
A group of anti-casino protesters chanted Shame on you! Shame on you! as they were escorted out of the meeting at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan.
Jack Hu, an anti-casino organizer, said afterward that the proposals would have a disproportionately negative impact on the citys Asian American communities, which are largely concentrated in Queens.
Our seniors and working people have long been dehumanized by casino operators, treated as cash cows to milk for money, Hu said, backed by other opponents holding protest signs outside the building. They bus our seniors to casinos, and they give them meal and gambling vouchers in the hopes that theyll stay long enough to lose their entire Social Security check.
The commission is authorized to license up to three casinos in the New York City area after voters approved a referendum back in 2013 opening the door to casino gambling statewide.
Since then, four full casinos with table games have opened in New York, but all of them are located upstate, miles away from Manhattan. The state also has nine gambling halls offering slot machines and other electronic gambling machines, but no live table games.
The closely watched competition for a New York City license began with a crowded field, with some eight proposals in the running as recently as September.
But four of the high-profile plans failed to get the stamp of approval from local advisory boards, automatically knocking them out of contention.
Among the most notable was a Jay-Z-backed plan to build a Caesars Palace in Times Square, as well as two other resorts proposed in central Manhattan.
Then in October, MGM abruptly pulled out of the license sweepstakes, saying the competitive and economic assumptions underpinning their plans had changed. The Las Vegas casino giant had planned a major expansion of the Empire City Casino, a slots parlor located at the Yonkers Raceway north of Manhattan.
By Philip Marcelo, Associated Press
Heres some good news: If you have student loan debt, you could soon qualify for a repayment plan that comes with lower monthly bills.
The eligibility requirements for the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) Plan have been updated to allow a broader swath of student loan borrowersincluding higher earnersto enroll in this plan as a result of a provision in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed over the summer. You may be able to switch to this plan, even if you dont have partial financial hardship.
The U.S. Department of Education is working to update its system to implement the updates to the IBR Plan and said it anticipates that those changes will be completed this month.
In the meantime, servicers will hold IBR applications that would otherwise be denied. servicers will process those applications after the system changes are completed, the Department said in an update from last month. We encourage borrowers who applied for the IBR Plan and were denied due to lack of partial financial hardship before we instructed servicers to hold these applications to reapply.
That said, borrowers who are freshly eligible for the IBR Plan may have to wait several more months before they start to receive their new monthly payments. Thats because the Department has pegged July 1, 2026 as the date when borrowers who have eligible loans can access the IBR and the date when there will be no restrictions on enrolling in IBR.
The Department of Education didnt immediately respond to a request for comment from Fast Company regarding the timing of when borrowers will begin to receive their new monthly bills.
EXPANDED ELIGIBILITY
The changes from this past summer mean that more high-income borrowers will now be eligible for this income-driven repayment plan. But the Department of Education is also scrapping three other affordable repayment plans: The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, the Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) plan, and the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) plan.
Borrowers under these three plans may switch to the IBR plan, though they wont necessarily see their monthly payments go down. Borrowers in PAYE may not see their monthly bill change much under IBR, while theyll be higher for those borrowers currently enrolled in SAVE, Mark Kantrowitz, an expert on student financial aid, told CNBC. But many borrowers enrolled in ICR will have lower monthly payments once they switch to IBR, he added.
Though the eligibility for the Income-Based Repayment Plan has been expanded, other aspects remain the same. The monthly payment will continue to be calculated as 10% of a borrowers discretionary income, with a 20-year repayment period, for those borrowers who first took out a loan on or after July 1, 2014. For those borrowers who took out a loan prior to that date, the monthly payment amount is calculated based on 15% of a borrower’s discretionary income, with a 25-year repayment period.
Whats more, there are still exclusions to the IBR Plan that include Parent PLUS borrowers whose loans have not been consolidated and recipients of Perkins loans and other loan programs who have not consolidated those loans.
If youve recycled a Nespresso capsule recently, your spent coffee grounds could help Los Angeles recover from the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
Nespresso is donating 100,000 pounds of compost, made in part from recycled coffee capsules, to City Plants LA, a nonprofit that plants and cares for trees across the city. The Swiss brand will deliver the compost in three batches, and recently sent off its first batch of about 30,000 pounds to the nonprofit.
Nearly a year after the Palisades and Eaton wildfires, the soil across Los Angeles county is still impacted. Wildfires contaminate soil with heavy metals, alter its nutrient contents, and increase the risk of erosion.
Compost can help restore that soil, adding in nutrients and binding with contaminants.
City Plants will use the compost from Nespresso to replant or save trees that survived the wildfires, as well as on new trees it’s planting throughout L.A. It expects to distribute more than 8,500 trees to L.A. residents. (Residents can also pick up compost from the nonprofit.)
To create compost, Nespresso’s partners use a mix of organic materials, so coffee grounds can make up between 5 to 20% of the final product. That 100,000 pounds of compost donated to L.A. will be made up of about 5,000 recycling bags of Nespresso capsules, or about 20,000 pounds of coffee grounds.
[Photo: Nestlé]
How Nespresso recycles
This isnt Nespressos first time turning its coffee grounds into compost. The company has long worked with composting company AgChoice as part of a complimentary recycling program.
Customers can recycle their used capsules by mailing back bags of spent pods or dropping them off at Nespresso stores. (In New York City and Jersey City only, customers can also toss used capsules into their curbside recycling bins.)
From there, its partners extract the coffee grounds from the aluminum, turning the grounds into compost, and the metal into new objects, including Nespresso capsules, pens, or even bikes.
[Photo: Nestlé]
In the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, though, the coffee company wanted to do something specifically for Southern California, and so launched this effort, called Grounds to Grow LA.
We were trying to figure out, how do we find a project that could provide meaning to us and also our community? says Amy Uong, senior recycling manager at Nespresso USA.
[Photo: Nestlé]
Making composting relatable
Nespresso connected to City Plants, and, throughout the fall, put out a call to action to its California customers, encouraging donations at the 13 Nespresso stores throughout the state.
However, since composting takes time, the 100,000 pounds that will be donated to City Plants includes compost processed before the project began, collected from across the country.
Still, by appealing to California customers and focusing on wildfire restoration, Nespresso hopes to make the recycling process more tangible to its customersand increase recycling participation.
Currently, Nespressos recycling rate is 35%; it aims to reach 60% by 2030.
It was really about, how do we influence more consumers? How do we give them meaning to participate in the recycling program? Uong says.
Recycling can be abstract to consumers, she admits; they may put something into a bin, but they dont see what it becomes.
But with the coffee grounds turning into compost, it’s something they can see. They can see a tree on the street or in their backyard; the residents can go and pick it up. They’re now active in that process.
Omnicom said on Monday it will lay off more than 4,000 employees and fold several well-known advertising agency brands after its $13 billion acquisition of rival Interpublic Group.
The advertising industry faces a serious threat as artificial intelligence reshapes creative production and tech giants such as Meta make it easier for businesses to churn out ads at scale and speed.
Omnicom’s high-stakes acquisition of Interpublic Group, which was completed in November, aims to regain momentum in this shifting landscape, as it contends with fierce competition from French ad giant Publicis and UK’s WPP.
The company said creative agency DDB, founded in 1949, and creative marketing agency MullenLowe will be integrated into Omnicom’s TBWA.
FCB, one of the largest global ad agency networks owned by IPG with roots dating back to 1873, will be absorbed into Omnicom’s BBDO, according to the company.
Omnicom said more than 4,000 jobs would be cut as part of the IPG integration, mainly in administrative roles but some leadership positions will also be impacted.
After the job cuts, roughly 85% of the roles will be client-focused, while 15% will be administrative, the company said.
The financial benefits would surpass $750 million in annual cost savings initially projected to investors, it added.
“We will be delivering this news as promptly as possible to maintain transparency and privacy for those affected,” Omnicom said in an emailed statement.
The advertising giant said the cuts should be seen against the backdrop of similar restructuring at rivals such as WPP, which is also expected to axe jobs under new boss Cindy Rose.
Interpublic Group laid off about 3,200 employees in the first nine months of 2025, according to a regulatory filing. Omnicom last year reduced its staff by 3,000 to about 75,000.
The Financial Times first reported the developments earlier on Monday, citing interviews with Omnicom executives.
Jaspreet Singh, Reuters
Additional reporting by Anhata Rooprai.
Oxford Dictionary just revealed its official word of 2025. Its rage bait.
According to an official announcement post, Oxford Dictionarys team of lexicographers choose a shortlist of potential words each year by analyzing data and trends to identify new and emerging words and expressions, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit, and examine the shifts in how more established language is being used.
This years final contenders were aura farming, biohack, and rage bait. In the end, 30,000 members of the public voted for their top choices, and Oxford chose rage bait as the winner.
Per the Oxford Dictionarys editors, rage bait is defined as: Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.
This year, rage bait has emerged as both a silly trend on platforms like TikTok and a legitimate marketing tactic for companies attempting to stand out onlineand its a perfect encapsulation of the digital landscape in 2025.
What is rage bait?
Based on Oxford Dictionarys analysis, the term rage bait was first used online more than 20 years ago, in a 2002 posting to Usenet.
In its earliest form, rage bait referred to a drivers reaction to being flashed at by another driver requesting to pass. Since then, Oxfords post reads, the word has evolved into internet slang used to describe viral tweets, often to critique entire networks of content that determine what is posted online, like platforms, creators, and trends.
In the last 12 months alone, online use of the phrase rage bait has tripled. On platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, describing something as rage bait has become a silly trend that frequently rakes in millions of views.
For example, a creator might purposefully rage bait their parents on Thanksgiving by stating obvious facts as revelations or poking fun at their political views; rage bait their partner by asking purposefully ridiculous questions; or even rage bait their cat by interrupting their grooming process.
In the real world, rage bait has also emerged as a genuine strategy that some companies rely on to catch potential customers attention in an overcrowded marketing landscape.
How rage bait has become a popular marketing tactic
Shock value marketing isnt a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. But our current era of political and technological divide has opened the door for companies to try a new kind of attention-seeking provocation.
This genre of rage bait marketing takes advantage of online algorithms, which are engineered to prioritize content that generates emotions like fear and rage to break through the deluge of content that users are looking at on a daily basis.
As Oxford Dictionary explains: [Its a] proven tactic to drive engagement, commonly seen in performative politics. As social media algorithms began to reward more provocative content, this has developed into practices such as rage-farming, which is a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait.
Examples of this trend include Nucleus Genomics, a genetic health company that recently debuted an ad campaign starring phrases like, Have your best baby and These babies have great genes; Friend AI, an AI wearable company that purposefully left blank space in a recent ad campaign to encourage vandalism; and even The New York Times, which, as Fast Company writer Joe Berkowitz explains in a recent analysis, has increasingly relied on inflammatory headlines to stoke readership.
Elizabeth Paul, chief brand officer at the award-winning advertising company the Martin Agency, told Fast Company last month that rage bait marketing, unfortunately, makes a certain kind of sense for brands that are threatened by our increasingly crowded digital landscape.
The reality is, according to Kantar, 85% of ads right now fail to meet the minimum threshold of attention for comprehension, Paul said. In other words, they are so bland and boring and invisible that people did not pay enough attention to even process what they said. In an environment like that, brand invisibility is a bigger threat than brand rejection.
President Donald Trump has commuted the prison sentence of former investment manager David Gentile, who was convicted of defrauding investors the latest in a series of clemency actions Trump has taken in white-collar criminal cases.Gentile had reported to prison on Nov. 14, just days before Trump commuted his sentence, according to a White House official who requested anonymity to provide details of the clemency action. Gentile had been the CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital, which had raised $1.6 billion in capital to acquire companies in the auto, retail, health care and housing sectors.He had been sentenced to seven years in prison after an August 2024 conviction for his role in what the Justice Department at the time described as a scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the performance of three private equity funds.But the White House official said GPB Capital had disclosed to investors in 2015 that their capital might go to pay dividends to other investors, which the White House said undercut claims that the company had engaged in a “Ponzi” scheme in which new investments are used to reimburse previous investors.The government has agreed to no restitution in the criminal case, though various civil cases are handling repayments and damages to investors.
Josh Boak, Associated Press
The Salt Lake City Olympics planned for 2034 are now the Utah Games after organizers announced a new logo and name to reflect the multi-community work that goes into hosting the largest winter sports event on Earth. The state’s Governor, Spencer Cox, says the new logo has united peoplethough not in a good way.
“It’s really brought people together because everyone seems to not like it,” Cox said at a recent press conference.
[Image: Utah 2034]
The new logo is temporary until the final emblem of the Games is released in 2029. It spells out “Utah” in irregularly shaped characters (does that say “IJTAH?”) that are stacked on top of “2034.” Its launch color palette is just black and white.
Cox called the logo bold. “I’m a little old-fashioned and it’s certainly a bold logo,” he said. The comment section of one local Utah news site included reviews like “beyond terrible,” “a marketing disaster,” and “unreadable.” Some don’t like the name change that leaves out Salt Lake City. “It hurts,” Salt Lake County Mayor Erin Mendenhall told The Salt Lake Tribune.
[Image: Utah 2034]
A starting point, not a finish line
This bare-bones logo, though, is just the beginning of what will become an expansive visual brand expressed across venues, apparel, and more. It’s a starting point, not a finish line.
“I think that Olympics are uniquely a moment to do something new and different. And yet, many Olympics have bland and forgettable design,” Doug Thomas, an associate professor at Brigham Young University’s Department of Design and author of Never Use Futura, tells Fast Company. “Personally, I like that the Utah 2034 design team are swinging for the fences and trying something new and memorable.”
[Image: Utah 2034]
Utah organizers say the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allows for “transition logos” to “help the host regions build early awareness and momentum,” but they’re limited to typography only.
The Utah 2034 mark, then, is a chance to introduce shapes through letters and numbers alone, the beginnings of a geometric visual language that could one day be revealed in a full Olympics brand expression.
Just as the “Chrystal Rhythm” pattern of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games appeared in the snowflake-like Chrystal logo and was repeated across assets like venue signage and the iconic jackets worn by volunteers, the shapes in the letterforms of the Utah 2034 mark could well be repeated in future expressions of the brand.
“The typography is recognizable, it is distinctive, and as such, opens space to create new meaning,” Thomas says. “The visual forms may not work in every application, but for a transition team logo, this is excellent as a starting point.”
[Image: Utah 2034]
Brand inspiration
Organizers say the shapes of the letters in the logo were inspired by Utah’s landscape. It’s most noticeable in the stylized A designed to evoke southern Utah’s Delicate Arch. Other characters were drawn to resemble rivers, mountains, canyons, and petroglyphs, and one can imagine these same angles and shapes showing up in Olympic pictograms that denote sports and venues.
[Image: Utah 2034]
The letterforms are monospaced and laid out on a grid. Inspired by the urban grids that Mormon pioneers laid out in cities across Utah and the American West in the late 1800s, it gives the otherwise unusual logo a sense of balance. The logo was designed by a project team led by Molly Mazzolini, cofounder of the Salt Lake City design studio Elevate Creative.
As for the name change, Salt Lake shouldn’t take it personally. Cox, the governor, says naming the Games for Utah instead of Salt Lake City was a decision made following decades of feedback from other cities and counties in the Salt Lake metro area that also hosted events during the 2002 Games but didn’t get credit. But it’s also aligned with the recent trend of Winter Olympics naming themselves after multiple cities or a region instead of a single city. The 2026 Milano Cortina Games are named for both Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy as they’re being held across a wide region, and they 2030 Games are named for the French Alps.
In Utah, where events will be held from Provo to Park City, organizers are going with the state name. And by embedding the geography of Utah into the very letters of their new logo, designers found a creative way to begin telling Utah’s story in just a few characters.
