A Brief History of Soccer Ball Design

It turns out the design history of the soccer ball can be a fascinating thing.

via Core77:

The plight of the soccer ball will be familiar to product designers and consumers alike: Here you have this object that seemed to work fine, but now it keeps relentlessly evolving into new forms even though you may have been completely happy with the one you grew up with.

So why muck with a good thing? Core77 decided to take a look, from a design perspective, at some of the changes undergone by the ball in the last 30-some years.

Follow that up with two articles about the World Cup 2010 ball, the Jabulani (part 1, part 2). It’s fine with me if FIFA wants to invest their money into redesigning a soccer ball that already works, but right about now I wish they’d spent of some of it on Vuvuzela countermeasures.


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