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For the Korea/Japan 2002 poster, the two ‘0’s in 2002 became frames, each cradling one of the tournament’s two host flags. It was the first poster Berlin-based Italian/Dutch type designer and hand lettering artist Mark van Leeuwen made in his spontaneous, self-initiated World Cup poster series that sets three of his own typefaces against the colours, shapes and elements of the host nations’ flags.
Each design is built around two elements, the host nation’s name and the tournament year. “The process was actually pretty organic, just playing around with the typefaces until finding a lockup that clicked with the country’s name and date,” van Leeuwen tells us, and once a lockup clicked, the flag details tended to follow on their own. “In a lot of cases, the flag elements practically wrote themselves into the design.” For Chile 1962, the swirls and curves of the numbers already looked like the pattern of a football, so he spun that into a comet trail dividing the canvas exactly the way the Chilean flag is split. For Brazil 2014, the blue disc from the flag was extrapolated into the globe of the World Cup trophy, set on the classic green and yellow.
Which typeface took the lead on a given poster came down to how its letters met the country’s name. Cortese, van Leeuwen’s sharp display serif reinterpreting Philip Kelly’s 1977 Cortez, and its geometric sans companion, Cortese Sans, are prominent. “Cortese Sans is the typeface that features most in the series, as it’s the most versatile one and lends itself best to most designs,” he explains. The two typefaces with more pronounced character were used for the posters that could handle them: Oakley, his soft, rounded old-style serif in the Cooper vein, represents Brazil, while a typeface he is still drawing was used for Chile. “Oakley and the new typeface I’m still working on carry a lot more distinct flavour, which made them the perfect picks for the Brazil and Chile designs respectively,” he adds.
Rather than build a rigid template off that first poster, van Leeuwen let each nation set its own terms, chasing flag references only where they arrived naturally. “It only looks right when it feels natural and you don’t overdo it,” he notes. Where an explicit flag reference would have been forced, he dropped it and worked from the nation’s colour palette alone, which is why several posters are purely typographic and less illustrative, the host nation present only in its colours.
“I love using self-initiated projects like these to test-drive my typefaces and really see what they can do,” van Leeuwen reveals, and with the new typeface still in progress, laying it out at poster scale is where the flaws surface and the tweaks suggest themselves. When the type design stalls, the posters hand it back a fresh perspective, and sometimes designing with his own typefaces in a layout like this sparks ideas for entirely new projects.