After the design community's reaction to the London logo, the mascot was always going to be a difficult job. But UK agency Iris has just unveiled not one, but two characters for the Olympic and Paralympic Games: Wenlock and Mandeville. Both are clearly of the age. And we have to say, we think they look rather good…

Iris has seemingly thought hard about the fact that in 2012, the will be broadcast in unprecedented fashion and that, of course, means taking into account how the mascots can be used over various media, websites, animations, and etc (yes, both Wenlock and Mandeville already have Twitter feeds).

The two characters are named after Much Wenlock in Shropshire, the village that hosted a precursor to the Olympics in the 19th century, and Stoke Mandeville hospital, the birthplace of the Paralympic Games. Each mascot also sports a yellow light atop its head, as a reference to 's black cabs, and the Olympic Rings get a nod via Wenlock's bracelets.

You can more images of them both, here, at the London 2010 mascots page, which also has some early signs of how the pair will be rolled across the London 2012 merchandise.

Unveiled on BBC One's The One Show earlier this , Wenlock and Mandeville appeared as two shiny models in the . Both, it's claimed, were born from drops of steel from London's Olympic stadium.

The press generated so far has, however, largely used photographs of the more predictable mascot iterations of ‘two people in giant suits' and these don't look half as impressive as the shinier, 21st century versions.