World Cup of Money

A while ago now I created some bottle top art for Intuita’s head office in Newbury, following our rebrand. Since then I’ve wanted to design another mosaic and I had the idea to use coins. I settled on the World Cup trophy as the gold colour lent itself to using coins and given it’s such an iconic image, it should be easily recognisable.

If you’re the artsy fartsy type, I’m sure you can infer some political undertones of the link between wealth and global sport. If you’re not, hopefully you’ll still think it’s kinda cool. I’ve framed the artwork and hung it next to our signed Gazza shirt.

It’s life-sized and all the coins are from countries that have competed at the World Cup. I gave pride of place to coins from World Cup years, especially if that country competed. The mix of coins is slightly skewed by countries I’ve personally visited but I did add to my collection specifically to cover some of the more obscure countries. I did stop short of finding coins from every single country that’s been represented.

With my data hat on, I couldn’t resist cataloguing all the coins I used before I glued any down. It uses 215 coins from 40 different countries, plus one dollar bill.

I’ll have a think of how I can create some sort of dashboard from my spreadsheet. For now, here’s a video and some photos of the finished article. You’ll see I had a bit of fun with the reflection – a boy can dream!