Football: Designing the Beautiful Game (Catalogue)

Design Museum
Football: Designing the Beautiful Game
(Catalogue)

This book — the first of its kind — explores the design story behind the worlds most popular sport. It seeks to dispel perceptions of football culture as crude, showy and tribal. Instead showcasing the incredible care, affection and expertise that go into the myriad different facets of the game. The book design communicates the simplicity at the heart of football, inspired by its humble grassroots. The cover furthers this notion, by reducing the game to it’s core — a ball and a goal. Working with John Elvin’s archive material from his groundbreaking work on the football programmes of the early 1970s, we recreated a series of extended endpapers that set a humble yet dynamic introduction to the book.

The catalogue was designed to be in keeping with the tactile language of the exhibition produced in collaboration with OMMX. Working with the colour palette and typography we’d developed for the exhibition’s 2D design, we translated these elements into the books bold use of graphics, materiality and finishing techniques.

Edited by Eleanor Watson & James Bird