As i wrote earlier today over at Kicksguide, awesome job. But I know you’re not posting this here to bolster your ego, so here are my two krone’s.
Before I checked out your complete project over here, my first thought was that this was a team based shoe. However, after viewing the whole thing I realized it was very “Air Jordan” in terms of performance being put first. I agree with Ade’s comment about the shoe lacking a certain “oomph” to a certain extent, however, I really like how you combined the helicopters sharp horizontal line and the anatomical lines in the midsole, visually it looks terrific. Those kind of subtle details really make me appreciate a shoe, and I’m a big fan of minimally designed shoes (Air Pippen II being my all time favorite), but I feel there has to be something that catches you from a distance.
I read somewhere that in order to create a succesful shoe, you have to:
- Catch the customer from a distance, make the shoe distinct somehow, so he’ll want to pick it up.
- When viewed from up close he should notice the details and quality manufacturing.
- Delivering performance and comfort when tried on.
(something like this, does anyone remember something along these lines being posted?)
You’re right there, some minor tweekings or making something pop out should do the trick.
Your sketches explain your thought process really well, and illustrate that this project was not at all about painting a pretty picture.
All the tech stuff, amazing, nothing to add. Beautiful illustrations, the butterfly, dope! I really admire how you go into details about the materials used, I remember a certain someone that worked for Fila before moving some place else always going into detail about material use.
One other thing that I would look into, before you put this in your portfolio, is refining the graphic design part of your presentation, in terms of narrowing your font selection down to two maybe and deciding where to use underlines or bold. What I’m talking about is most apparent on your two inspiration sheets, you’ve got serif fonts in the body and some sort of pixelled font as headings that don’t appear anywhere else. Looking at some of those things would really make your presentation seem as more of a whole. A good thing to do would be to sit down a divide your text into three or four groups or so. One group of main headings, second of under headings, then perhaps two groups of text bodies, depending on how technical and thorough it is. One other thing is the framing of your images, the rounded edges look good and relate to the project, but on some places you have sharp edges on your frames, is there a reason for this? I think sticking to the rounded ones would be the way to go. Line thickness as well, they seem to vary somewhat on borders. But overall, you’ve got some great graphics that really complement your design, I just think it’s a matter of simplifying them a bit.
I think that pretty much sums it up, like I said earlier over on KG, I’m really being picky here and I think this is one of the strongest and most thorough concepts posted by any of us that frequent these boards. Thanks for sharing Tony.
kind regards, Sindri