Here at Yellow Car Design we’re big football fans so are understandably looking forward to this summer’s World Cup. To be honest: even more so than usual due to being in Canada while it’s on. We get to support England without all the usual hype and ridiculousness that surrounds an English World Cup campaign. Hopefully this time they will forget about the WAGS, play as a team, learn how to take penalties and take advantage of what is a fairly open tournament (yeah, who am I kidding?).
As this is a design blog, we’ll need to bring it around to World Cup based design… First up is the mascot Zakumi who is apparently a ‘Mascot with Attitude‘, although he doesn’t actually display any of this ‘attitude’ and looks like he easily fits in with all those lame characters that aren’t Sonic in any of his games. While better than the London 2012 mascots which it would have a job to be worse than at the end of the day it’s a bit bland. The mascot is an anthropomorphised leopard but could quite honestly be any type of anime influenced cat-boy and with some minor editing to the colours could be used by pretty much any country with some tangible links to big cats. While I understand that the mascot should appeal to kids as well as be fun it really should say something about the country in general as while obviously the football is the main draw an event as big as a World Cup is a massive opportunity to showcase what’s great about the country hosting.
Another piece of World Cup design we stumbled upon was this World Cup Calendar Poster which has somehow received a mention by Creative Review. While for a good cause (Unicef Soccer Aid) and actually quite nice looking in a generic kind of way I’ve got to wonder why it warrants a mention by Creative Review. To me it doesn’t actually say anything about football. Granted: it’s a nice use of text and colour but other than the countries being shown in their respective kit colour (or for the teams who use white their away kit colour so New Zealand football team who go by the nickname of ‘All whites’ are shown in black which to me instantly makes me think rugby but I guess this is a OK solution to the problem posed) there is little else that makes this standout as a football related image.
Another problem is the reverse side is fairly confusing with not much space, the creator posted a link in the comments to show people how it works as many who had commented on the post brought up this problem but while his solution is OK for the group stages once the tournament has left this stage it again gets overly confusing and the lack of space in the later rounds means you’ll have trouble filling in both the team and the scores (especially if you use a big bold marker pen like he does in his example for the earlier game results). Weirdly it also doesn’t seem to have a location to write down the eventual tournament winner (unless he wants you to write it over the grey text at the bottom on top of the sponsors) which to me at least seems a massive oversight, surely this should be the major focal point of the poster as after all it’s what all the teams there for leaving it out is like a massive anticlimax.
Anyway it’s still quite nice looking and for a good cause but to me it’s a case of too much form and not enough function that would have been much better had a little more time and thinking being spent on it.
