A while back (2010) before the world cup in South Africa, I decided to give designing a World Cup wall chart a go.Â
Why? Because I was tired of looking at all the usual charts that newspapers and magazines would pump out and I wanted to give designing a wall chart for the world cup a go. I also wanted to learn more about using the pen tool in photoshop and how to use it to create shapes and then colour those shapes in an effective way. On a technical level this sort of task should be done in either adobe illustrator or Affinity Designer. The reason for this is that these programs are vector based and photoshop is bitmap based. Now you can do vectors in photoshop, but they are outputted in bitmap formats and can lose their quality when being printed. Vector programs use mathematics to create the shapes allowing them to be scaled with no loss of quality making them better suited for page layout and design in general. When I did this project I couldn’t afford Illustrator and Affinity Designer was not even a thing. But I did have photoshop, so that’s what I used.
Tournament wall charts have to have two basic things: group & knockout stage areas and spaces to add scores and team names. Everything else is decorative.
The Characters
I based the idea of the chart on the now defunct weenicons character style, specifically the Captain James T Kirk design. The design style is 2D and is ideal for someone looking to learn new tools in photoshop. I opened up the saved James T Kirk base image and sketched over the top, trying to create each part of the character as a different section that would allow me to adjust it at a later point.
Building a texture for the background
Most world cup charts are a mishmash of player photos or are just really cluttered design elements. Football is played on grass (most of the time) so I wanted to the base of the chart as a grass texture. I used a basic green vignette and then blended it with a random grass like texture using the ‘overlay’ blend mode. I then contrasted this further and added a white radial gradient to create a highlight. The section for the tournament details was a repeated leather texture coloured blue that was also set to overlay blend mode.
Specific Details
One thing I wanted to do was add some very specific details. Most of the charts you find in newspapers are created for workplace walls for sweepstakes or just to keep track of results. I wanted to throw in some additional information. I added a section detailing some facts about South Africa, the Stadiums and about the World Cup in general.
The Stadium
Soccer City Stadium (also known as The Calabash or FNB Stadium) was built in 1987 and renovated for the 2010 World Cup. The renovation took inspiration from the shape of an African pot called a calabash. Along with The Bird’s Nest Stadium it is one of the more unique looking football stadiums in the world. I found an ariel image of the stadium from Google, then traced a vector image on top. The purpose of this asset was to a background element for the final. Two techniques I used here was adding a gradient layer to create more of a 3D shape for the stadium and using coloured noise to create the crowd effect.
The Finished World Cup Wall Chart
2 Comments
This is awesome! Can you make something like this for the 2025 Club World Cup?
Hi Shaun, thank you for the comment.
Honestly, its the licensing issues and funding that would prove to be a nightmare for this type of thing. Firstly you have to get a license from FIFA to use the name “World Cup” and then estimate the number of replications of those protected trade marks. Large companies will go after smaller companies/individuals to protect trademark otherwise that trademark becomes valueless. A legal case brought to court will not be validated for a trademark if the holder of the trademark has shown they do not protect it. Then its production costs followed by finding a company to distribute it. The character design would need to change as well to avoid copyright issues. There is a line at which it would need to be priced and I cant conceivably see someone wanting to pay more than a tenner for a wall chart when so many media companies produce them for free. This means your production number would need to be mega high in quantity to cover costs and to make anything back on it. So, I have thought about it. Things like this that I usually class as learning exercises as the practicality of producing these things usually isn’t financially worth it.
Paul