www.Nike.com (1996)

Nike's first web site

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Nike's first web site was created in support of their efforts at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta.

In addition to designing this site, my team and I also conceived the unique branding solution that became the overall identity for Nike's digital efforts leading up to, during, and after the event.

As the story goes, if you're not an official sponsor of the Olympics, you're aggressively disallowed from using any of their trademarked words, such as "Olympics", Olymic games, and that year, even "Atlanta", among others.

Well, Nike doesn't sponsor the Olympics. True to their authentic heritage, they sponsor individual Olympic athletes. A lot of them actually. And Nike's support of these athletes is arguably in excess of a standard corporate Olympic sponsorship.

So the challenge in illustrating Nike's commitment to these Olympic athletes was, needless to say, complicated. Nike isn't a company to shy away from a challenge however, and put the task to Red Sky.

In response we developed the:

(swoosh)@LANTA logo.

Which, incidentally was the first time we'd ever seen the "@" symbol used in such a way.

The Nike team applauded the identity when they saw it, and told us we "hit it out of the park". Identity design doesn't often go there, especially with a company like Nike.

It's also interesting to note that when we began exploring various creative directions for this web site in late 1995 & early 1996, Tables, the layout tags allowing developers to cut up graphics and realign them, in adjacent tables, creating the illusion of one continuous graphic, didn't exist. Or rather, it was inconsistently implemented in most browsers, and therefore was not a technical option. It wasn't until mid-way through the dev process that new browsers, including the brand spanking new I.E 1, officially supported tables and we immediately rethought our design concept to utilize it.

As such, Nike's first web site became one of the most graphically advanced sites of its time.