Nike Basketball · All-Star Weekend '23
Preservation
of Sport
Creative Director + Concept · Ona Creative · 2023
Nike Basketball’s ASW Signature Collection — the preservation pack — had to connect three signature shoes to the legacy of the players who wear them. The game was in Salt Lake City, and the line arrived in an instant: “Cured in salt, forever preserved in time.” Millennia ago, in early sub-Saharan civilizations, salt was valued more than gold; the practice of curing was essential to life, and became essential to preserving history. So I preserved a basketball court in salt — built so you couldn’t tell whether it was a hundred years old or a year old — as the stage for LeBron’s XX, KD’s 15, and Giannis’s Zoom Freak 4.
We set the hero shoes on an old basketball court, dressed to look left behind since the court’s origin. Rather than photograph the players themselves, we shot models — action over identity, wearing the gear of their heroes, beginning legacies that could one day rival the greats’. “Hoops is never done, and sometimes progress doesn’t start with standing on the shoulders of giants — it starts with standing in their shoes.”
I set the art direction and ran three simultaneous crews — video, main photography, product and off-body photography — and designed all of the print and retail that came out of it.
The three signature lines sat at the center of the collection, and I built a set of assets around each one. Working with Nike Basketball, I developed every custom wordmark and lockup myself, and set the art direction across all three.
The salt world carried through to retail — House of Hoops takeovers and Foot Locker doors across the country, anchored by the Salt Lake City flagship. It also gave me my first magazine spread: I directed the SLAM feature and laid it out myself.
One of the motion assets was an immersive ASMR TikTok built from the sounds of the court — wind across the salt, chains rattling on the net, the ball moving hand to hand.
ASMR is one of the biggest genres on the platform, and one of Nike’s best-performing posts is the same kind of thing. It was the right format for a campaign whose whole idea was texture and preservation.
Alongside the Signature Collection we built an app thread, email and @NikeSportswear social for the Preservation Pack — a secondary lifestyle line designed to echo the salt flats for All-Star Weekend 2023.
We designed a first-page layout announcing the Signature Collection for SLAM Magazine’s Feb/March ’23 issue — a top-selling basketball publication that has covered the sport since 1994. My first magazine spread, and I laid it out myself.
The motion work that ran alongside the stills — the cuts that actually went out.