Client: Nike
My work with Nike started when I stepped into the Creative Director role at Kennedy Communications. As an agency that specializes in the concept of Internal-External Brand Alignment, our focus with Nike has been directed at supporting core departments at their World Headquarters (in Beaverton, Oregon) and the Nike EMEA Headquarters (based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Our work has primarily revolved around programs and initiatives that build internal brand awareness and corporate culture.
Motivational poster series
As a company with a reputation for empowering peak performance in athletes, Nike wanted to motivate their internal administrative teams to maximize their own health and wellness. I wrote and designed a series of posters which communicated key brand attributes while encouraging employees to live those attributes in their own lives. We provided the posters as fully editable pdf files so the client team could modify them to include details about multiple specific events, challenges and seasonal messages.
My role: Creative direction, art direction, image editing, production prep.
Retail Employee Safety Campaign
Nike wanted to create a one-page, recurring segment in their internal corporate publication called The Retail Register. The segment would communicate topics related to workplace safety and loss prevention and needed to engage young retail team members.
Our solution was to create a fun and cheeky serial comic that introduced a well-intentioned superhero named LP Man who offered practical, if not amusing, safety tips. The use of humor and irreverence allowed Nike to introduce important loss prevention topics in a memorable way. During the two years that Nike ran the Close Calls serial, they enjoyed a notable reduction in loss prevention incidents.
My role: Creative direction, art direction, copy editing.
Executive summit motivational book
Created as a keepsake for a top-level management summit for Nike executives, the Wine Book leveraged metaphors from viticulture to provide elements of wisdom as they relate to nurturing and mentoring members of the worldwide senior management team. In all, only 12 hand-constructed leather-bound books were created for the meeting within a two-week window from the project’s inception to delivery of the final books to the event planning team.
My role: Creative direction, art direction, image editing.
Interactive team member progress tools
One of the characteristics that sets Nike apart as a premier employment brand is their relentless search for improvement and optimization. Nike engaged us to explore the possibility of an interactive tool we called the Nike Individual Development Platform, which would be launched from their internal intranet site.
In an effort to create a new and unique user experience, I presented two different prototype tools that leveraged Flash technology (in vogue at the time) which used simple interface animations to present their “Coaching For Excellence” content. In the design shown here, the user’s experience would be that of exploring deeper into the content with each successive stage – when clicked, each octagon would enlarge to fill the screen, exposing more content and more tunnels of information. Individual user data would be captured as local shared objects (flash cookies).
My role: Creative direction, UX/UI development, art direction, image editing.
Employee re-engagement Suite
This initiative was a sweeping company-wide effort that examined every role within the human resources function to assure maximum benefit and efficiency for both the organization and the employees. We were involved in the process on a consultative basis and provided clarity to the field throughout the process. The tools pictured were designed to convey careful consideration of the human element in the decision-making process and were intended to show the present and future state in a way that would set context and answer practical questions.
We developed a web portal component to transparently convey the timeline and ongoing details of the process, while the printed and interactive versions of the “strategy map” were created to fully explain the impetus behind the project. Initially, the strategy map was intended to be nothing more than my working mock-up to explain the concepts to the core working team, but they liked the vehicle so well that they used the rough comps as final artwork to convey the strategy to broader employee audiences.
My role: UX/UI development, art direction, illustration, image editing.