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June 11, 2006
32 Balls for FIFA World Cup
I was thoroughly impressed with the exhibition called Qualified - that takes a unique approach to nationalistic design by taking the cultures and cliches of each of the 32 competing countries and representing them with a soccer (football) ball. The designs are gorgeous and quite humorous. Take for example, America's ball is covered with levis denim, a nod to the country's culture of work and the wild wild west. Japan's ball is covered with anime manga, and Brazil's ball looks like Carnival reincarnate.
As beautiful as the balls were, I wanted to do something interesting with them. I used to play soccer as a kid but quickly fell out of love with it. Today, I have very little understanding of the sport so the best way for me to learn is to do something creative with it.
I studied how each of the 32 qualifying teams are divided intro 8 groups. Each team competes with its group members to become the alpha dog only to compete again with the other top alpha dogs. Eventually, your team works its way up a pyramid schematic to claim FIFA World Cup champion. The whole tournament takes place over thirty days and these games come one after another; EXHAUSTING!
Okay so now I get the gist of it, but how do I visualize that? Why not take the 32 balls from the Qualified exhibition and arrange them in a way to visually represent how each ball (country) fought its way to the top, how far they got, and which competing team stopped them in their tracks.
So here it is, my base design. You can see each of the 32 countries represented by their balls at the bottom. I have the beautifully designed Adidas Matchballs as placeholders. As the World Cup progresses, I'll update those empty spots until we finally have a winner, represented by a large Matchball.
I thought about making this into a website, by where a user could roll over each ball to get a teams win/loss record, city, maybe even stats and video clips. But alas, there are A LOT of stipulations to using the World Cup emblems and I just didn't want to get into legal problems.
So anyways, let me know what you think of the idea. I plan on releasing it as a digital poster (this thing is HUGE) after the whole tournament is over.
Posted by tranism at 5:29 PM | Permalink
Comments
OMG, I want this poster? Will you PLEASE let me know when you finish it? How big is it? Is it gonna be printable? My dad would love it too.
btw = love your blog. the best around town.
Posted by: Jesse at June 11, 2006 8:46 PM