So the answer is yes, you would like to transition to being a professional footwear designer.
Are you focused on basketball shoes?
On the “flesh” concept, it could be produced with effort, but the question is why would an athlete want to wear a shoe that looked like human tissue? It would be cosmetic in nature, in order to product it it would be highly synthetic and molded, like the Nike Foamposite you showed. A very cool shoe that is hot and stiff. Who would this be fore and how would it help them to perform better?
On the outsole, you would definitely need multidirectional traction like herringbone (zig zag). A pivot point would also help as would moving the flex groove in the forefoot rearward. You don’t neccesarily need so much rubber under the arch of the foot. The foot doesn’t contact the ground much there and eliminating rubber in this area reduces a lot of weight. What you may need there is a shank plate of some sort to stiffen this area.
Below is a good example of an outsole designed by Brian Kutsch, one of my designers when we both worked at Converse. It clearly shows good overall positioning of flex grooves, a pivot point, multidirectional traction, as well as more solid rubber in areas of high abrasion.
Most NBA athletes want their footwear to be lighter, more flexible in the forefoot, and supportive through the mid foot and ankle with lots of adjustability and lock down in the laces (a lot of them tape their ankles pretty aggressively which means the shoe needs a wider opening to fit them). Would love for you take this feedback and incorporate it. Make you concept more around how the shoe works vs how it looks. Develop the aesthetic concept in concert with the functional one.
In the below example, the concept was taking the aesthetic from 80’s basketball shoes (and their relevance to Converse’s glory days in the sport, Bird vs Magic, as well as popular culture from the 80’s through to today, people still wear 80’s BBall shoes) and fuse that with modern performance techniques, best practices and material science to produce an NBA level shoe that could cross over to the street. I think Brian did an excellent job hitting that brief in this midsole/outsole unit.
