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Nike minisite

Client: Nike
Creative Agency: AKQA

Nike was born 30 years ago with one goal in mind -- to help athletes perform better. Over the years, Nike has learned a few things about the human body and how it performs. And one thing they’ve learned is that if you let the body perform the way it was naturally designed to perform, it will perform better. No one is more in tune with the athlete’s body and how it moves than Nike. This is what makes Nike Free innovation so revolutionary. The website needed to be as innovative as the shoe itself. AKQA brings the emotional and visual sensation of bare feet to customers at the Nike Free site. The Flash animated information campaign describes the concept behind Nike's new Nike Free shoe design and gives visitors a dynamic sense of how the shoes look and feel.
-- James Jenkins, account manager, AKQA

Creative Showcase is meant to be a teaching tool and an inspiration for our readers. We comment only on creative that we really love. Our panelists discuss what makes it great, but if they feel there were missed opportunities that would have made it better, we invite them to mention those. And finally, we seek out a wide range of opinions that reflect the marketplace for the panel, in order to provide constructive, useable feedback for agencies, clients and others involved in these creative pieces.

There's a whole lot to like about this Nike Free site. First, the use of video throughout the experience is extremely well done and high quality. Most of the visuals on the site are engagingly at either sky or shoe level, so there's a bird's eye/worm's eye cinematic quality to the viewing experience. I was also quite taken with the bottom nav on the site (after you've clicked away from the home page), which reaches up to embrace the mouse in a friendly and eye-catching way that also resembles a toothy smile. The home page bottom nav, by the way, is also engaging with mouse-over video. On the downside, perhaps it's just that I'm getting older with concomitant vision loss, but I found the home page's white text on blue and white background to be a squint-inducing challenge. Similarly, the white text elsewhere on the site was frequently harder to read than it should have been.
-- Brad Berens, executive editor, iMedia Communications

AKQA's Nike Free minisite falls somewhere between a stylish Power Point presentation and a television commercial (make sure you start with the "Discover Nike Free" tab when you explore this ad). It's catchy, a snap to navigate, and I'm just dying with curiosity to find out what it feels like to wear these shoes.

On the interactivity front, I like the "See the Shoes" tab in this piece; it's a great way to play with the product and get feature info. Most online ads might have a static image of the item where you roll over data points for details, but AKQA took a different approach. The Nike Free minisite allows you to rotate the product, bend it and pick up feature info along the way. Well done. 

My only issue with the ad was the "Personalize Your Feet" section. It doesn't actually allow you to personalize your feet. Instead, it gives you a link to jump off the minisite to an ecommerce destination where you may personalize your own shoe (if Nike hasn't reached its quota of orders for the day). I know that's not the design team's fault. But it would have been nice to play with shoe customization in the minisite, even if I didn't intend to buy.
-- Mario Sgambelluri, managing editor, iMedia Communications