Champion of the World!

For my Calligram Project, I wanted to focus on another sport that I was quite passionate about. I decided to choose Formula 1. The project idea was quite simple, use letters to shape the trophy that is awarded to the driver who wins the yearly "World Drivers Championship".

reference image of the trophy

It wasn't as simple as it seemed. Firstly, just drawing the shape with a computer mouse was quite cumbersome, but I managed to get it nicely done. From there, I converted the line shape to lettering, and for the lettering, I decided to use each of the countries/cities of the 21 race tracks on the 2019 F1 Calendar.

From there, I needed to decorate the interior. I created goldish-yellow lines and then tried to fit the text onto them with the line to text tool. However, my text would be positioned awkwardly, and wouldn't fit the way I wanted it too. However, I realized I could simply rotate the blocks of text to approximately cover where the interior lines would be, so I did that, painstakingly for each line I drew on my trophy. The text on each line was taken up by a former F1 World Champion, with more recent ones up high, and older legends lower.

Here is a list of each champion on the list, and in what year they won the title:

Lewis Hamilton: 2008, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018 (5 times, most successful British driver ever)

Nico Rosberg: 2016 (1 time, son of former champion Keke Rosberg)

Sebastian Vettel: 2010-13 (4 times, recent winning catchphrase: "Grazie Raggazi, Forza Ferrari!")

Jenson Button: 2009 (1 time)

Kimi Raikonnen: 2007 (1 time, known as the "iceman")

Fernando Alonso: 2005-06 (2 times, has also won Le Mans twice)

Michael Schumacher: 1994-95, 2000-04 (7 times, most of any driver)

Mika Hakkinen: 1998-99 (2 times, nicknamed "The Flying Finn")

Damon Hill: 1996 (1 time, son of former champion Graham Hill)

Ayrton Senna: 1988, 1990-91 (3 times, widely regarded as the greatest driver of all time)

Alain Prost: 1985-86, 1989, 1993 (4 times, nicknamed "The Professor", had a massive rivalry with Senna)

Niki Lauda: 1975, 1977, 1984 (3 times, suffered severe burns to his face and lungs from a crash in the 1976 German Grand Prix, and despite almost dying from the wounds, recovered and returned to racing just one month later)

James Hunt: 1976 (1 time, famous rival of Niki Lauda)

Juan Manuel Fangio: 1951, 1954-57 (5 times, tied with Hamilton for 2nd most all time, most successful driver from the Western Hemisphere)

Emerson Fittipaldi: 1972, 1974 (2 times, won McLaren's first ever World Championship)

Jochen Rindt: 1970 (1 time, posthumously awarded title)

Jackie Stewart: 1969, 1971, 1973 (3 times)



The final quote at the bottom is said by Sky Sports F1 Broadcaster David Croft, who always says "It's lights out and away we go!" at the start of each F1 Grand Prix. I also made the background black to highlight the interior of the trophy more.