"The fall before I got my Fulbright Grant, I had a great experience in Mexico helping with the Eames’ film “Day of the Dead.” During those early years at Eames I had met Sandro Girard who became an enormous influence on my life. The kind of color that Sandro used was very inspiring to me; and Mexico became a major force on the aesthetic side of who I was. Many years later when I did the colors for the ’84 Olympics, the idea for those colors was based on the Pacific Rim, on my experience in India, and on the cultures of Los Angeles — and those cultures were impacted by Mexico, Japan, and Asia. Magenta was the major color of the ’84 Olympics. I was very surprised that it was used for the London Olympics in 2012 as well. Magenta is now au courant: you see a lot of magenta with yellow, orange, and red and so forth. That was a palette that inspired me in the 1950s"

(Deborah Sussman: Creative Foundations, 2020)