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A minimalist illustration of a football pitch in shades of green. White geometric lines and circles create a stylised, abstract representation of the field.

Art: Taylor Holland makes a mockery of the well-defined markings of sports fields

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Date
15 January 2014

Artist and designer Taylor Holland enjoys visual trickery. His Frames project used Photoshop’s Content Aware tool to fill in frames of pictures hung in the Louvre and prior to that the Paris-based creative documented the weird and wonderful tour bus graphics he saw in his hometown. His latest project Vector Fields is a series of interactive websites which “explore what happens when the boundaries of sport are manipulated through play.”

And so the lines of a football field or the lane markings in a swimming pool are allowed to slip their moorings and we the viewer can spin and twist them into various patterns we find more pleasing. Why we find this so satisfying is perhaps a question that needs a little more consideration; but maybe it’s the manifestation of some innate anarchic spirit in a digitally-defined world?

Play with the whole gang here: whether it’s a football pitch, a basketball court, a tennis court, a swimming pool, a baseball diamond, an ice hockey rink or an American Football pitch you want to muck about with!

An abstract illustration of white geometric lines, circles and arcs on a bright blue background. The composition is framed by a thick red border, which is intersected by a single diagonal white line.
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Taylor Holland: Vector Fields – h00ps.com

An abstract illustration of a burnt orange rectangle set against a teal background. Thin white lines criss-cross the orange shape, accompanied by four small white dots arranged in two vertical pairs.
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Taylor Holland: Vector Fields – 2ennis.com

An illustration of a light blue rectangle set against a dark blue background. A series of thin, white diagonal lines cut across the centre from top left to bottom right.
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Taylor Holland: Vector Fields – sw1m.com

An abstract illustration of a bright green rectangle set against a darker green background. Thin white lines intersect across the centre, with several horizontal lines running parallel to each other.
Above

Taylor Holland: Vector Fields – 4ootball.com

A diagram of an ice hockey rink, shown from a top-down perspective. The layout features a black perimeter with red and blue markings for the face-off circles and centre line.
Above

Taylor Holland: Vector Fields – iceh0ckey.com

A simplified illustration of a baseball diamond from a top-down perspective. The green field is set against a pale yellow background with a brown infield and a white pitcher’s mound.
Above

Taylor Holland: Vector Fields – be1sbol.com

An illustration of a bright green football pitch viewed from above. White lines mark the centre circle and penalty areas, with diagonal lines cutting across the field.
Above

Taylor Holland: Vector Fields – 4utbol.com

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About the Author

Rob Alderson

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Rob Alderson is a freelance writer, editor and strategist. He was previously editor-in-chief of It’s Nice That and WePresent, and editor of Design Week. He publishes the newsletter Undo, which tries to make sense of how AI is changing design work, the design process and the design industry.

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