Nike Well Collective Yokohama
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During my time with the SGK Nike team, I worked on many Nike APLA store projects and merchandising decks. However, the Nike Well Collective Yokohama was quite different, as the final art was delivered as flattened, low-resolution files.
Although the artist sourced by Nike Japan was a well-known local Japanese illustrator, her work was not vector-based, which posed challenges due to store brand guidelines. This made it difficult to apply her illustrations across a two-story exterior wall in a walkway and the remaining exterior and interior walls. The illustrator was using a proprietary raster-based drawing program that only produced flattened raster artwork. To complicate matters, the art was then imported into Adobe Illustrator for additional shadowing effects and assembly before being output again as flattened raster files. The intended use required large format output, not only for this location, but also for other applications, necessitating a fully scalable vector illustration set that matched the original raster images perfectly.
It became my responsibility to create vector-based art that could scale for both interior and exterior applications. This was challenging, but the artist used a limited palette that allowed me to separate, trace, and register the illustrations to produce detailed vector art closely matching the original raster illustrations. During testing, I was able to select and isolate each color in the final artwork required for installation. All 25 illustrations required meticulous cleanup to isolate the colors from the artist’s flattened raster files into a Photoshop file, creating separate layers for vector tracing.
The success of this project was evident in the on-time opening of the store, featuring the local artist selected by the Japanese Nike team, as shown and approved in the original presentation. While I worked on many larger and smaller Nike projects during my time on the team, I had never encountered a project as challenging as this. Although additional time was added to the original estimate, stakeholders were pleased that the design intent was preserved and that the project was delivered successfully.

Project Roles: Technical Designer
Skills: Brand Design, Production