Nike 2024
Creative Direction

Challenge
Victory is the heart and soul of Nike. It’s the brand’s namesake. However, the common way that most would define victory in fact alienates many athletes. Victory is more than just about the wins. But how do we make athletes see that while walking the fine line between inclusivity and aspiration.

Solution
Change how athletes see victory by transforming it into more of a feeling, rather than an outcome. A feeling that only you can feel.

Role: Senior Visual Designer

In order to change the perception of victory into more of a unique feeling for athletes, we crafted a design direction that combined Nike’s roots in iconic portrayal’s of athletes with a new typography-led way of visualizing each athlete and product’s story.

Typography was a principle way we could infuse personality and feeling into the direction. Starting with Helvetica Neue as our base, we added selective “word hacks” into our type treatment to imbue each design with a story-driven type treatment. This treatment is variable depending on the athlete/product story/insight/benefit.

Another way we found we could incorporate unique, story-driven design elements was through color. We created a simple technique of extracting a set of colors from a blurred crop of a story’s core imagery and using that to fill things such as micrographics, headlines, and backgrounds.

Taking cues from the natural sounds of sport, we constructed a motion concept that brings an inherent energy into the design system. The sound of a footballer sprinting up the pitch. The sound of a basketball bouncing off the hardwood. All of these sounds are taken and used to create a natural yet rythmic tone for the motion system.