I’ve been working on this design for a while, probably about a month and a half, and this is the finished product.
I was thinkning about the feedback i got with my last design (ipod shoe) about thinking the design through more and approaching it from all angles. So I really tried to do that with this one.
sorry i’m having trouble posting pics, so here’s the link
the shoe was orignially inspired by the IPOD nano, but then I decided to use the greek god Mercury as an inspiration.
The shoe has no laces, it uses an internal TPU stretch cage with a zipper that wraps around the inner bootie for midfoot lockdown, and an ankle strap for ankle support. The ankle strap and ankle panel are made out of perforated neoprene that would be pretty stiff, to prevnt ankle injury. It has a TPU heel counter, a max air unit in the heel and zoom air units in the forefoot. It also has a molded flex groove in the upper, an outrigger, a carbon fiber shank, a pull tab in the back, and an inner bootie.
lateral and outsole
medial and heel
midfoot lockdown
inner bootie and zoom air/max air layout
thanks for looking, feedback welcome
UPDATE
I thought the design wasn’t presented very well, so I decided to play around with the presentation. This is my first presentation. I used Paint.Net, and Gimp to do this.
what does this shoe have to do with mercury? or was that just an afterthought?
Also, what were you planning on doing with this project? it doesn’t seem to have much premise in an already flooded pool of footwear concepts.
Your sketching has improved a lot since the ipod shoe, keep it up. However I am still feeling a lot of tension in your drawing style, try to free it up a bit, maybe have some more flowing curves. Maybe you should practice some figure drawing to get your skills up a bit.
The lines of the shoe also seem to be a bit disjointed, try to think of the form of the shoe as a whole, rather than just one element at a time.
Tripluss, your constructive comments are getting much better, not sure if that hurt while you typed it or not though…
AK_ def improving. I can’t believe I’m typing this, but I think you should take Tripluss’s advice and look into taking a figure drawing class to loosen up a bit. I like how you are deconstructing the shoe. The next step is figuring out who this shoe is for? What is the unique hook? If it is to be the first laceless BBall shoe, why not bring structure outside?
thanks for the comments tripluss and yo, i’ll try to loosen up my drawings.
Yo: yeah i see what you mean about bringing the structure on the outside, I did think about doing that I just didn’t think the TPU stretch material could withstand very much hard play if it was on the outside, i could be wrong though.
Tripluss: Your right, the mercury inspiration was sort of an after thought, but i did alter the design after that inspiration. I had this picture of mercury’s foot, and he was wearing some sandals, After seeing that picture i did alter my original design to resemble the sandals. Also, Mercury has wings on his feet so I geared the shoe towards high flyers, with lots of air cushiong and the ankle strap to lock the foot down while they were in the air.
I’m still pretty young so I don’t know if I could find a figure drawing class anywhere, but i’ll try.
Google it, you might be surprised how many drawing classes are offered. Keep doing what you are doing. Design skills take time to learn, the more time you put in up front, the more ahead you will be. Thanks for having the courage to post your work. It really does help you to do better, even just to know other people will be seeing it.
