Nike Sportswear Design Direction

Throughout seven seasons as Global Design Director at Nike, I guided the Sportswear team in shifting campaign art direction away from traditional street photography to a hybrid image space where photography co-exists with illustration, graphics, and three-dimensional imagery. In essence, film photography was replaced with hyperreal image compositions.

As part of this effort, I introduced and advocated for a different class of creative partners for NSW. Candidates and collaborators included: Justinas Vilutis, Ada Sokol, Maxime Guyon, David Brandon Geeting, Culturesport, Kasper-Florio, and Timothy Luke.

Nike Sportswear is the company's lifestyle category. Where other categories are concerned with sport and performance, Sportswear is concerned with youth culture and fashion. For many years the creative strategy was to utilize street style photography to communicate authenticity. At the same time, Nike has never shied away from heroic storytelling when it comes to their athletes. If the company could make Charles Barkley wrestle with Godzilla, why should Sportswear be any different? This was an attempt to bridge that divide between lifestyle and performance—to inject the heroic ideal in everyday life and culture.

Nike Sportswear Global Brand Design Team:
Senior Creative Director: Serifcan Ozcan (2018–2019), Everett Vangsnes (2019)
Design Director: Eric Hu
Art Directors: Andre Simmons (2018–2019), Dawn Yawnagihara (2019)
Senior Designer: Dawn Yawnagihara (2018)
Designer II: Claire Kang, Jake Gevalt
Designer I: Miyu Shirotsuka