Illustrating the history of the World Cup, one shirt at a time
Client
Zalando
Country
United Kingdom
Disciplines
Infographics
Campaigns
Sector
Fashion
Retail
Big Group is a London-based marketing agency with more than 25 years’ experience connecting brands with markets and customers through integrated campaigns, digital experiences and performance marketing. BakerWilcox worked directly with Big Group on the project, which was conceived as a showcase of the agency’s creative and digital capabilities.
The brief
Big Group asked BakerWilcox to illustrate more than 270 football shirts worn by the 32 nations competing in the 2014 World Cup, covering every previous tournament for which those countries had qualified. The completed illustrations were to form part of an interactive online infographic for Zalando, combining football history with the retailer’s connection to fashion.
As you get ready for this year’s ceremony, take a look back at what every Best Actress winner since 1929 has sported on the Red Carpet, from traditional black dresses to glittering, over-the-top frocks.
TIME
The iconic Brazil team from 1970
every shirt was painstakingly researched and illustrated
The execution
The project began with extensive research into more than 270 historic shirts, gathering photographic references from tournaments stretching back to the earliest World Cups. The available source material varied enormously in age, quality and detail, so each kit had to be carefully interpreted before it could be recreated as a clean, consistent illustration.
We developed every shirt as a high-resolution digital artwork, reproducing the changing colours, collars, patterns, crests and manufacturer details that made each design distinctive. A unified illustrative style allowed shirts separated by several decades to sit naturally together, while retaining the characteristics that football supporters would recognise.
The sheer number of kits presented a significant information-design challenge. To keep the complete history visible without sacrificing detail, the infographic arranged the shirts by nation and tournament, with interactive behaviour allowing individual designs to enlarge when selected. This transformed a dense historical archive into something intuitive, visual and enjoyable to explore.
The finished piece brought together sport, fashion, illustration and data visualisation in a single digital experience. Released by Zalando to coincide with the 2014 World Cup, it was shared by international sports media and later longlisted in the 2015 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards.
As football fans, we relished the opportunity to immerse ourselves in more than 80 years of World Cup history and recreate over 270 iconic shirts. Seeing the finished project longlisted in the 2015 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards was a hugely proud moment and a wonderful recognition of the research, craft and attention to detail behind the work.
RICHARD BAKER
A digital version was developed to easily view each shirt in detail
