New Studio X NIKE: a sturdy branding design system that pays it forward

How do you empower community activism via rebellious design? Enter New Studio’s branding system for NIKE’s movement for change aka NIKE Future Movement. 

Commissioned by NIKE global to brand the company’s NIKE FM progressive new platform the design practice headed by Axel Peemoeller and Rita Matos build a compact but highly flexible heavy typographic system to unite a global agenda that calls for “systemic change through a sports perspective.”  

NIKE Future Movement houses all community-based initiatives from NIKE, acting as a channel for programs such as Be True, La Familia, N7, We Are Born Ready, among others. Therefore, the NIKE Future Movement identity is a “strong and recognizable brand that allows individual community identities to shine within. It acts as an authenticator and as a vehicle for the unique message of each of its communities” explains New Studio. 

“But how do you brand community activism? We went back to the most basic step for starting a movement: spreading and propagating information. We took reference on traditional media broadcast formats and layouts, such as zines, newspapers and printed matter, and from there we broke it up into a consistent but mutable and adaptable design system.”

The fonts, the experiment, the semantics: TwoPoints.Net on their bespoke collaboration with NIKE

Set in Pangram.Pangram's strong, bold and flexible grotesque Formula, New Studio opted for a unique type treatment by customizing the typeface's weights and letterforms - ‘A,’ ‘M,’ ‘V’ and ‘W’ are heavily slanted. 

“The logo concept is based on two principle ideas 'inclusivity' and 'propagation'. Inclusivity means that the individual communities are being seen and heard and therefore represented, for which the parentheses symbolically stand for. Propagation is the concept of one thing influencing the other which then influences the next and so on It’s the spreading and expansion of something (eg a plant, an idea, or information). This is included by the radiating shapes of the parentheses” adds NS. 

Enter the future here.