99% Invisible

267- The Trials of Dan and Dave

This is the story of an ad campaign produced for the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona. Perennial runner-up in the sports shoe category, Reebok, was trying to make its mark and take down Nike. They chose two athletes, plucked them out of obscurity, gave them Reeboks to wear, and turned them into household names, spending $25 million dollars in the process. That was more than Reebok’s entire marketing budget the previous year. This ad campaign is pretty much remembered as a...

266- Repackaging the Pill

Most people are familiar with at least one version of the birth control pill’s packaging — a round plastic disc which opens like a shell and looks like a makeup compact. But the pill wasn’t always packaged this way. The first birth control pill to hit the market came in a simple glass bottle of loose tablets, like any other prescription pill.
How the pill traveled from these nondescript bottles into some of the most heavily designed and recognizable pill packages in...

265- The Pool and the Stream

This is the story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in Southern California and landscape architecture in Northern California, and then the world. A documentary in three parts by Avery Trufelman.

The Pool and the Stream

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264- Mexico 68

The 1968 Olympics took place in Mexico City, Mexico. It was the first games ever hosted in a Latin American country. And for Mexico City, the event was an opportunity to show the world that they were a metropolis as worthy as London, Berlin, Rome or Tokyo to host this huge international affair.
Among other ground-breaking aspects of the Mexico 68 games, the graphic design campaign (including the logo, posters and other graphics) would become one of the most famous in Olympic...

263- You Should Do a Story

“You should do a story…” is the first line to a lot of the conversations you have when you work at 99pi. This week we look into a bunch of those stories suggested by our listeners and present them to you: trademarks, desire paths, electricity standards, electric clocks, and a bevy of regional design solutions.

You Should Do a Story

262- In the Same Ballpark

In the 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, right along the downtown harbor. The stadium was small and intimate, built with brick and iron trusses—a throwback to the classic ballparks from the early 20th century. It was popular right from the start. No one knew it at the time, but Oriole Park at Camden Yards would change the design of ballparks all around the country. Its success set off a building...

Intro to a new Roman Mars podcast: What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law

Special introductory episode to a new podcast produced by Roman Mars and Elizabeth Joh.

Professor Elizabeth Joh teaches Intro to Constitutional Law and most of the time this is a pretty straight forward job. But with Trump in office, everything has changed. Five minutes before class Professor Joh checks Twitter to find out what the 45th President has said and how it jibes with 200 years of the judicial branch interpreting and ruling on the Constitution. Hosted by acclaimed...

199- The Yin and Yang of Basketball

In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the height of the baskets, he inadvertently created a design problem that would not be resolved for decades to come.

The Yin And Yang Of Basketball

This piece is part of a podcast mini series ESPN called “Dunkumentaries.” It’s a collection of stories all related to basketball’s slam dunk. The feed is live and you can subscribe...

261- Squatters of the Lower East Side

In 1987, three years after moving to New York City, Maggie Wrigley found herself on the edge of homelessness. She was trying to figure out where to stay, when she heard about an abandoned tenement building on the Lower East Side. It was owned by the city, but it had been left empty and unmaintained. The building was full of rubble. Some of the walls were rotten and falling down. There was no running water. But it was a place to live, rent-free. Wrigley moved in.
It wasn’t...

260- New Jersey

The Brazilian soccer shirt is iconic. Its bright canary yellow with green trim, worn with blue shorts, is known worldwide. The uniform is joyful and bold and seems to capture something essential about Brazil.
But it was not always this way. Brazil used to play in plain, unremarkable white shirts. The story of how the uniform changed goes back to the World Cup of 1950, held that year in Brazil for the first time.
Joe Sykes has the story of the new jersey, the man who...