Vans · Concept & art direction · 2018
Vans Customs
People use Vans’ shoe customiser once and forget it; few come back to design more. One reason is that most people struggle to design a shoe from scratch. At INDG I pitched two concepts to bring them back: Transparency and Entanglement.
- Client
- Vans (pitch)
- Agency
- INDG
- Role
- Concept, visual direction, art direction, page design
- Visuals
- Made with freelancers, under my art direction
- Year
- 2018
Transparency
Security and privacy has become a very current and contentious topic. The promise of open data, the perils of mass surveillance and a world where we live our lives in posts online 24/7 have deteriorated the trust in large organisations.
As the Vans brand embraces individuality and community, the ethos of the company needs to be vigilant in safeguarding their customers’ trust and staying committed to openness and transparency.
The concept of ‘Transparency’ is an attempt to address such issues by turning the act of data collection on its head. The aim is to promote openness and clarity in a fun, if slightly whimsical, approach to the consumer.
The challenge is showing interesting data in an engaging and fun way all the while avoiding the dry “Google Analytics” facts approach to representation.
As tastes and styles have changed over the years, and the popularity of designs varies in different parts of the world, which designs are considered mainstream and which are “out there” or obscure? How can we embolden the users of Vans Customs to make informed stylistic choices?
These are the questions we aim to explore in this concept.
Clean vs Reckless
Year by year
Break your shoe in
Shoes of your city
Entanglement
Every day, everything we do has a profound impact on the world around us. Everything we say, touch or do changes the people in our lives as much as they change us. How we behave, how we look, what we say – those are the factors that literally define our life.
We all are entangled with the world and each other. And this concept is about showing how the act of designing a Vans shoe affects, interacts and comingles the environment it lives in.
Black & White poster scene
Street kids scene
Image briefs
Frontal view on the wide frame, the canvas is black, the picture’s frame is golden, grotesquely complicated and large. The wall behind the picture is covered with fur. The picture is lit from the top. Shoes are standing on the glass platform on the bottom half of the shot.
The canvas starts empty, with only the ‘off the wall’ logo on it. As we add patterns and colours to the shoe, images start to appear and reconfigure with each new addition.
A frontal or 3/4 shot on the wall, red brick or smoother paint. The ground is taking 1/3 (road pavement, ground with wild grass, tiles) of the shot. The shoes are hanging on the laces, in the centre of the scene.
Most of the wall is covered by graffiti. 0-3 people are in the shot. Skateboard, sofa, sculpture, warehouse pallets, fridge, bicycle, graffiti, half-painted canvas, chairs, books, mirrors.
As we start with a blank shoe, the street is empty and the graffiti is blank (painted over). With each element customised by the user, new element is added, and the scene starts to live.
- Skateboard: standing vertically against the wall, laying upside down on the pavement, in-flight at the top-centre or sides of the image.
- Sofa: leather or cloth sofa; aged, rough and patched up. Standing in the centre of the image.
- Sculpture: Rafael or Michelangelo masterpieces, roman emperor bust. White clean or polished black, covered in moss, half painted with red, green or blue.
- Warehouse pallets: single, half-destroyed, standing on the ground. Multiple, stacked on the ground + against the wall.
- Fridge: covered with graffiti, freezer door is ripped out, main compartment door is half-open. Cat sleeping in the top freezer, lower insides are padded with fur and have baseball bats standing, and jewellery on the bottom.
- Bicycle: BMX, road bike. A person is cycling through the scene, the bicycle is standing against the wall, lying on the ground, several bikes are standing in a rack.
- Graffiti
- Half-painted canvas
- Chairs
- Books
- Mirrors
