‘Several people have told me over the years, ‘just give them what they want.’ I can’t bring myself to do it. I have to inspire them.’

“Several people have told me over the years, ‘just give them what they want.’ I can’t bring myself to do it. I have to inspire them.” Deborah Sussman spent a decade as art director at the Eames Office before opening her own practice in 1968. The scheme she inherited for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was a red, white and blue star-in-motion, dropped as too nationalistic; the palette she built instead drew on the cultures of Southern California — Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, India. Her team produced 150 designs across 28 venues and three villages, made with almost no budget from cardboard columns, rented tents and painted scaffolding.