Nike: Journey to Greatness
T-shirt design for Nike
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T-shirt design for Nike
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A collaboration between Nike and University of the Arts (UAL). Four colleges from UAL handpicked four alumni to represent their institution, I was part of team LCC – London College of Communication. Over the course of five weeks — during which we met several world-class Nike athletes — each team created a t-shirt design for famous sports brand Nike. My other team members were Alex Leonhardt, Valentina Verč and Freya Dyson. The project was mentored by artist Dave White and LCC Dean of Design Lawrence Zeegen.
Our initial inspirations came from the meetings we had with some of today's best athletes: Harry Aikines-Aryeteey, Allyson Felix, Dai Greene, Paula Radcliffe. They all talked about sacrifice; how being the best requires them to prioritize their sport over other important aspects in life, such as friends and family. Harry talked about his fear of failure and how winning is addictive, while Dai shared with us how his days are planned out and repetitive in order to be as prepared as he can be for a race.
These ideas of determination, addiction and repetitiveness excited us and they formed the basis of our concept. We went through an extensive research and development stage touching on viscous circles, spirographs, kaleidoscopes and strobo photography. We also knew we wanted to use information design for our final piece so that was a thread throughout our conceptual phase.
After our first interim crit we decided to look for more unconventional ways of data visualization, something that was more unpredictable and organic and that reflected our initial inspirations of determination, addiction and repetitiveness. That's how we found the automated drawing machine by Robert Howsare - we rebuilt his machine made up of old turntable decks, made a few tweaks and started experimenting with it.
Our final concept draws from the 5K we ran with Paula - the idea that everyone can run and that it's addictive even to the mere mortal. One of our teammates ran from Niketown at Oxford Circus to London College of Communication at Elephant&Castle - two places that obviously meant a lot to us during this journey - while our turntable was drawing the final design based on the date the runner fed back to us: his heart-rate, speed, time and location.
The videos show our mentor Dave White talking about our first day of the 'Journey to Greatness', and the video reporting on our Nike journey.
Our t-shirt was for sale in seven Nike shops throughout London for £35.
Press: The Guardian, It's Nice That (here and here), prote.in, the UAL blog and artwednesday.
Photographs by Ryan Hopkins, films by Andrew Telling.
Photographs by Ryan Hopkins, films by Andrew Telling.
