Our 2018 campaign for the 4th Annual Nike Air Max Day is comprised of films launching over 20 new Air Max designs. Each film is an excavation of and homage to the individual strands of Nike design DNA that go into each sneaker: "Turning Imagination Into Reality".

Air Max Day is the story of an ongoing state of reinvention within the sub-brand and we tapped into an anti-design approach that allowed us to unify Nike's eclectic and ever-changing melting pot of inspiration. As each new shoe is introduced, windows and animation vignettes appear and disappear, revealing the design inspiration behind each sneaker. Each film is produced within a tight system that allows forms of design that normally don't mingle together entwined to tell the stories behind each product.

The visual direction had to balance the past with the present and reflect Nike Air’s progressive state of re-imagination: an eclectic, ever-changing, melting pot of inspiration. This year's approach takes cues from modern editorial design and hosts an extensive number of assets — from live action, 3D, typographical design, through to cel animation. Our anti-design framework was structured to retain a haphazard feel across all of the films, but it took multiple rounds of refinement to land a crafted version of this on-trend design style.

Finding ways to have a piece of 3D design move in a way that triggered a movement in a live action element was where all the fun was had. This added an extra layer of planning to the live action aspect of the project but it made for a tight system that allowed incongruous design styles to intermingle.