I’ve created many sneaker illustrations in my career as a designer, but never so many in one project. This is a type treatment I developed for an exclusive adidas T-shirt, celebrating the city of Atlanta, GA.
I began, as I usually do, by gathering my inspirations and source material. In this case it was a broad assortment of classic adidas sneakers, from the iconic Superstars to the Hi-Top Forum basketball shoe. I then created a lettering template by setting the type in Cooper Black, the characters of which lent themselves perfectly to the shapes of the shoes. I then set to work creating the vector illustrations of the shoes, which in total took me around 7 hours.
Once I had all of my shoes ready, I started fitting them to the shapes of the lettering. The curvature of the sneaker silhouettes dropped perfectly into place for the most part, and where they didn’t I used shoelaces as a device to complete the letterforms. I’m stoked about how this turned out. I had a blast creating all of the shoes and the final effect definitely paid off.
