Sketchbook of a GPS Artist

Juventus and Jeep® share a mission: to make a bold statement wherever they go

Juventus F.C. and its lead sponsor Jeep are traveling across Europe for the 2016 UEFA Champions League. To cheer on the team and leave a bold impression beyond the football pitch, Jeep’s marketing firm – Independent Ideas – enlisted me to develop a city-sized message in each city Juventus visits…starting with ‘boundless’ in the team’s home city of Turin. Each route will then be completed in a Jeep vehicle.

Designing this Doodle presented a number of interesting challenges. Read more below…

The next Juventus/Jeep Doodle will be in Seville, Spain for Juventus’ November 22 match. Stay tuned…

The Design Challenges

While Turin is a large city with large sections of fairly uniform grid – typically an ideal canvas for ‘bike-writing’ – the fact that so many of the city’s streets are ‘one way’ presented a huge design challenge. Several of the letters in boundless – the ‘u’, the ‘e’ and at least one of the ‘s’s – require the Doodler to double back along one or more streets after reaching the terminus of the letter…something that’s simply not possible when the streets comprising those letters allow travel in only one direction.

The constraints of completing the Doodle in a vehicle created other design challenges. While runners and cyclists can make use of footpaths, trails, open public spaces like parks and plazas, school fields and so on, a vehicle is for the most part confined to the city streets.

Overcoming these challenges meant scaling up the Doodle to the size of the entire city. At this size, I was able to use major thoroughfares that accommodate vehicular travel in both directions. While the trade-off is lettering less uniform than one can create in a compact, rectangular city grid, it results in a Doodle that’s truly impressive in its breadth. To complete ‘boundless’, the Jeep had to travel 64 km (40 mi).