The Vancouver Olympics begin this Friday. It's true, they won't be quite the design extravaganza that London 2012 will be--but there's still going to be hundreds of millions of dollars in design on display, everywhere from the uniforms to the buildings to the branding. Here's a look at the design elements you can expect to see flitting across your screen, in between shots of Johnny Weir, Apollo Ono, and Shaun White.

Here, the event logo, designed by Vancouver locals Elena Rivera MacGregor and Gonzalo Alatorre. The design is a rendering of an Inukshuk, a stone statue depicting a man and created for hundreds of years by the native Inuit tribes. The design won out in a open call which drew over 1,600 entries.

The Richmond Oval, designed by Cannon Design, will host all of the speed-skating events. True to the overarching green touches, the Oval has Silver LEED designation. It's roof, which is almost as big as seven Olympic hockey rinks, is made completely of discarded wood--making it the largest such expanse ever built....

...an interior view of the roof.

It won't be home to any Olympic events, but the newly completed Vancouver Convention Stadium, set on the water downtown, will be NBC's broadcast headquarters. On track for Gold LEED certification, and designed by Seattle firm LMN architects, it boasts one of the largest green roofs even built, spanning six acres.

The three outfits at left are Ralph Lauren's: Far left, the duds for athletes kicking around the village; next to that, the closing ceremony outfits--both of them heavy on the retro-Americana drag that's Ralph Lauren's bread and butter. At right, the podium outfits by Nike.

The medals, designed by architect Omer Arbel, who collaborated with Corrine Hunt, an artist from the Raven Gwa’waina clan, of the Kwakwaka’wakw village on Vancouver Island. Each one was cast from silver, gold and bronze reclaimed from discarded computer motherboards. (Check out a video on the process, here.)

A detail of the medal.

One of the podiums, designed by James Lee and Leo Obstbaum, the late design director of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Each one is made of 200 pieces of computer-cut lumber, and the undulating shape is meant to recall the mountains surrounding the city. [More info at Core77]

Athletes will trundle between the sporting venues and the Olympic village on two cutting-edge low-floor electric trolleys donated by Bombardier and shipped in from Brussels. They've already become a standard for green mass-transit--Since their introduction three years ago, over 450 have been installed across Europe, and Toronto has ordered 204 models of a similar design.

Inuit mythology pops up again in the cuddly Olympic mascots--Miga the Sea Bear, Quatchi the Sasquatch, and Sumi, the Thunderbird--which were designed by Vancouver firm Meomi Design. Unfortunately for Vancouver, some pranksters have noted the disturbing resemblance of these characters to Pedobear, who's be dubbed the internet's mascot of child porn.

Bombardier also designed the 2010 Olympic Torch, and the curves are meant to evoke wind swept snow banks. The Torch is designed to withstand extreme weather, with dual burners that allow the torch to keep burning even in rain, sleet, snow, and hail.