So the story goes like this: around 1993-94 Red Sky (the agency I started then) was creating floppy (!) and CD-ROM-based multimedia presentations (using Director) when the Internet happened. On a whim – I think it was initiated by Red Sky co-founder Joel Hladecek – in 1995 we decided to create a concept piece and send it to Nike – who had no website – out of the blue. No introduction. We created this weird piece and sent it up to Beaverton expecting nothing. Instead they invited us up immediately to talk.

We ended up being asked to design the first Nike website (and many other Nike projects) to be launched simultaneous with the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta (or @tlanta as we labeled it). Red Sky did the visual design. Organic did the back-end. The site was a big hit and won a bunch of awards, I think because of the liberty we took with the visual design – breaking way out of the early rectilinear, every-bit-in-its-place layout (Nike likes “messy”). And yes the graphics look dithered: this was back when we had to use 8-bit color palettes ya’ll. And DeBabelizer (remember that?) was my favorite tool.

This is the only Nike piece I’ll post in the portfolio, although we did dozens of major projects for Nike over the years. This was my first big one though and I’m sentimental about it.

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