NIKEiD.com Global Re-launch

The newly redesigned NIKEiD.com site had it’s global launch late last night. It’s quite a premium experience with it’s clean, sharp visual design, light page weights, ultra fast page loads, and smart interaction design. What an improvement over the last version of the site. Also, check out the new Collections section. It’s hot as hell and for all those sneaker nerds out there, you can finally iD those dunks.

Check out the site.

New Huarache 2K5 Feature on Nikebasketball.com

March Madness is upon us and the new team oriented Air Zoom Huarache 2K5 feature has just launched on nikebasketball.com. Check out this feature which was designed by design superpower, R/GA. Nike was able to get our favorite Ghost Dog, Forest Whitaker, to chip in with the voice-over.

Check out the site.

Kicksfinder.com Updated

Our good friends at KICKSFINDER have recently updated their site with the latest SBs and a new Jordan section. Give them a look and for those that don’t know already — Kicksfinder is a visual ebay kicks search tool.

Check out the site.

For Kicks – From NYTimes Magazine

By ROB WALKER

Mark Ong was a sneakerhead — that is, one of the thousands of people all over the world who talk and think about sneakers the way that Paul Giamatti’s character in the movie ”Sideways” talks and thinks about wine (only without chemical dependency or pointy-head metaphors about the meaning of life). Then, about a year and a half ago, a Web site called Niketalk held a contest, inviting readers to submit photographs of sneakers they had ”customized” — given new, hand-painted designs. Ong, a graphic designer, reworked a pair of white Air Force 1’s with a safari-print graphic treatment adapted from a different Nike model, and he won. There was no prize, but it was the beginning of a new career. Now known as SBTG(pronounced ‘’sabotage”), Ong sells his customized Nikes for $350 a pair.

SBTG is not the first sneakerhead to, in effect, go pro. The most famous customizer is probably the Los Angeles-based artist who works under the name Methamphibian, whose shoes (or kicks, as they say) can go for $900 a pair and who is now designing sneakers that are scheduled to be produced by DC Shoes, which makes skateboarding shoes and apparel. But the story of SBTG affords a look at one facet of the sneaker phenomenon — that is, the way that fashion and brand loyalty can come together in what might be considered the folk art of a consumer culture.

Ong works out of his apartment in Singapore, but his projects are transnational. After winning the Niketalk competition, he made a set of 72 pairs of sneakers for a store in Tokyo. He has since released sets with the Hong Kong toymaker adFunture and a London D.J. called Unkle. For Sneaker Freaker magazine, based in Melbourne, Australia, he contributed a step-by-step customizing guide and executed a custom Nike Dunk co-branded with the sponsor Tiger Beer. His shoes are included in the world-traveling sneaker gallery show Sneaker Pimps (sponsored in part by the Finish Line retail chain), and he is starting an apparel line, Royalefam, with Ambush, a Singapore boutique. ”Right up to this day, I still think that it feels kind of surreal,” SBTG told me recently of his transition from fan to brand.

SBTG’s first official U.S. sneaker release last year was at Packer Shoes in Teaneck, N.J. A boutique-style shop that looks as if it belongs in Lower Manhattan, Packer is a spinoff of a family-owned Yonkers store; Michael Packer, who runs the Teaneck store, explained that his father had one of the first Nike accounts in New York. On the night the shoes were released, a couple dozen sneakerheads journeyed to Teaneck and bought most of the 24 pairs of the SBTG X Packer Desert Mayhems.

Sneaker enthusiasm has a long history. Consumers have blurred the lines between athletic gear and stylish streetwear. Sneaker makers have responded by stoking the market for status-giving scarcity by producing limited-edition models that can draw small mobs (although it’s likely that the mobs are mostly sneakerpreneurs who then flip their purchases on eBay for huge markups). Perhaps customizing, the popularity of which is growing, gives consumers more control over what makes a product special.

Maybe the strangest thing about the sneaker subculture is that Nike, a mainstream megabrand, is not shunned like mainstream merlot in ”Sideways” but is at the center of the action. Niketalk.com was not founded by and is not moderated by the company but rather by a handful of dedicated sneaker fanatics who swap news, gossip and opinions about Nike products. Alex Wang, better known in the sneaker community as Retrokid, is an administrator of the site and is another sneaker enthusiast who has gone pro, as the creative director of the magazine Sole Collector. He says Nike is not directly involved in the site, though people at the company read it, and it’s widely believed that some of them post. (Nike declined to comment for this column.) Nevertheless, it’s essentially a community of brand fans, with more than 35,000 registered users. It’s as if a computer-hacker subculture developed around a devotion to Microsoft products. SBTG says he has had only limited contact with Nike, but so far it is the only brand of sneaker he has worked on. ”It’s got nice lines, nice space, it looks right; it sort of motivates me,” he says. ”It’s the perfect canvas.”

New SB Line

The new Nike SB line just recently launched. Above are the images of the Zoom Mopione, Air Mopit, and Vuldor. I’m not so crazy about the logos on the tongues.

saturday-london

Check out some of the Zvezdochka installation photographs on the saturday-london website. The saturday-london website may also be of interest to you designers out there. It’s another site that is using the zooming in and out navigation. Well executed and smooth to use.

Check out their site.

Nike Considered

Consider History. Consider The Present. Consider The Future.

CONSIDERED Exhibition @ Reed Space. Shoes that look different because they’re made different. An inside look at the evolution of Considered Design.

Opening Reception
Thursday March 3rd, 2005 // 7pm-10pm
RSVP Required: mrreed@stapledesign.com (include your shirt/shoe size)
*** SPACE IS LIMITED ***

View invite: http://www.thereedspace.com

Made possible by:
Nike / www.nikeconsidered.com
Staple Design /www.stapledesign.com