Sketchbook, Inc.

While working in brand design at Nike in 2003-2004, most of my time was spent on the Nike Speed initiative. At the time, this was the largest initiative Nike had ever undertaken.

The Speed campaign revolved around the 04 summer olympics. We worked on collateral, packaging, retail displays, events and more. I worked under Heather Amuny and Julie Freeman at the time, as well as David Odusanya. The visual style of Speed was a red stripe and lots of glass shards.

Below are a couple examples of some of the 3d work I did during that time. More to post on this.

This is the first project I ever worked on for Nike. I was hired through Creative Assets on a 2 week assignment designing bag graphics. When I started, the lead designer in the category (Jeff Dey) was out on vacation. This was one of the most vague projects I’d ever been given. I quickly realized that working at Nike required lots of initiative and self direction. I had almost nothing to go off of, other than a generic backpack and duffle bag. One design was to be “retro” and the other “contemporary”. I scoured a bunch of servers for assets, logo’s, etc and actually ended up with probably 40 rough comps for graphics by the time Jeff got back into town. Don’t know if any of these were selected. Can’t remember actually. Whatever the case, I had shown some potential I guess as they kept me on as a “permanent freelancer.” I stayed a few months and then took the job at ZCom.

W+K hired me to create these images for an ad campaign they were doing for Starbucks. The idea idea of the illustrations were to show different headlines in the same visual style as the Starbucks branded storefront lettering.

I was provided with the font which was used for the Starbucks logotype, and was also given several photos of portland buildings. To get the right look i went out and photographed some existing Starbucks storefronts to get the materials and construction of these signs correct.

Rendered in c4d using GI, the results were pretty nice.

I was asked to contribute as an artist to the online publication of  Born Magazine while working in Nike Brand Design. Fun experience. I was teamed with writer Andre Darlington and was tasked with creating the visual experience which represented his short story titles “After the Resurrection”.

The story was very dark and disturbing, so with my limited time, and fairly limited ability with flash, I decided to spend most of my time illustrating the various sentences of the story in a similar style to the story. As you can see there is a mixture of hand painted watercolor overlays and photoshop layering, all working together to provide a visually rich experience.

For the flash interface, I found a nice relic looking center element, and decided to use a circular navigation rig to move the viewer through the story. Limited interaction was found through this navigation and some scripting I added to the type which moves as you pass over it.

The experience can be found viewed here.