The front page of Saturday’s Johannesburg newspaper
Mexico was projected to win big over the South African national team in today’s opening match of the World Cup in Soccer City, near Johannesburg.
Instead, Bafana Bafana played much better than expected and pulled out a 1-1 draw. South Africans are delighted — a host team had never before lost an opening-round Cup game.
And then, later today, France and Uruguay played to a 0-0 draw in Cape Town. I watched this match as well, but I couldn’t stay as interested in it.
It’s now past midnight in South Africa, so I can safely let the lid off this next World Cup page…
—
THE FRONT PAGE OF SATURDAY’S JOHANNESBURG PAPER
Here is the front of Saturday’s Beeld, the Afrikaans-language paper in Johannesburg. The page comes courtesy of my good friend Andries Gouws, the A1 designer there:
What strikes us first, of course, is the wonderful photo by Reuters. Beeld and its parent company, Media24, have plenty of folks shooting the matches. But you go with the best art you can find. And Andries did that tonight.
The main headline refers to the Cup kicking off on a “vuvu-note.” That’s referring to the ubiquitous vuvuzela noise that filled Soccer City Friday.
Andries is a wonderful news designer. I started out last year mentoring the graphics folks but very soon found myself working with a few designers as well. Andries proved to be an apt student and a talented visual journalist, working up cool stuff like this and this.
On today’s A1, Andries has given us a couple of interesting graphic elements. The first shows how the Bafanas’ Siphiwe Tshabalala scored the opening goal of the 2010 World Cup:
The sequence was shot by staff photograher Christiaan Kotze.
Also on the front is this nice little infographic, probably built by Andries himself:
The first category is possession, showing which team controlled the ball the most. The third is success in passing. Google Translator isn’t finding anything for the second or fourth categories.
The blurb on the right points out that Bernard Parker was the “fastest” South African player at 16.44 miles per hour.
Also, notice how Andries is varying his nameplate for this very special event. On the left is a typical Beeld front page from last October:
In the middle is Friday’s front. Andries used the nameplate in a typical size and position but filled the letters with the South African flag.
For Saturday, however, Andries pushed down the size of the logo, moved it to the left and worked around the foreground of that wonderful photo.
Great stuff.
—
SOUTH AFRICAN INFOGRAPHICS
While Andries was toiling away on today’s Beeld front, the graphics team was hard at work on various World Cup pieces. Most of these pieces run in three Afrikaans-language dailies: die Burger in Cape Town and Volksblaad in Bloemfontein, as well as Beeld; plus the Sunday national paper, Rapport.
Sports-minded graphics whiz Jaco Grobbelaar built a six-column-wide graphic — on an seven-column grid — that previewed each of the 32 teams participating in the Cup:
One graphic ran each day for more than a month. The final day was South Africa’s turn:
The graphics were written by Eduan Roos and designed by Jaco.
Each day, the papers are running a six-column preview of that day’s events. This is the one that ran Friday, previewing the opening South Africa vs. Mexico match:
Here is one that runs in Saturday’s papers, previewing the huge England vs. Team USA matchup:
These are all clickable, if you want to see them larger. However, I don’t have English translations for you.
As the Cup progresses, I’ll continue to pass along cool stuff from the South African papers. (Note to my friends in South Africa: Please send me more pages and graphics!)
—
Are you doing anything interesting for the World Cup? Send me PDFs, please.
Previous World Cup coverage, here in the blog:
- Sunday, June 6: Preparing readers for the World’s Cup
- Monday, June 7: Monday’s World Cup pages
- Wednesday, June 8: World Cup pages from South Africa
- Thursday, June 9: Talking soccer graphics with Konstantinos Antonopoulos
- Thursday, June 9: Tooting horns for the World Cup
- Friday, June 10: Opening day pages