Nike — Space Hippie

A more sustainable sneaker website


Role:
Creative Director + Designer

Outcomes:
Concept, Strategy, UX/UI Design

Period:
Q3 2022

Overview

Nike’s Space Hippie sustainable sneakers weigh in at 25–50% recycled content, Space Hippie is trash transformed. They needed a digital experience idea and prototype to complement the launch of the next generation that could reflect their ‘Move to Zero’ manifesto, find new ways to power a Nike website and form early ideas about a sustainable digital footprint.

Research

We examined the page load of nike.com which was pretty beefy. Over a year, with 1,000,000 monthly page views, nike.com produces 7,732.07kg of CO₂ equivalent or 20,178kWh of energy, that’s enough electricity to drive an electric car 129,137km. So we thought could we do something? What if we could strip the whole experience back?

• Could we go back to the basics of web1 or even the green screen terminals of the 1970/80’s? 
  
  
• How would we get the best experience by just using a featherweight front end? Vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, make it a progressive web app and have some greener tracking and analytics.

• Could we show the customer that by making concious decisions about what to load and when that they could reduce their footprint while browsing? 
  
  
• Could we potentially self-host this on a Raspberry Pi to save even more energy or a sustainable host?
  
  
• Could we activate the experience from the main nike.com website? 
  
  
• We also had to honour the ‘Move to Zero’ and Circular Design Language.

Key Insights:

• Every time a user visits the Nike website, 1.56g of CO₂ is produced
• In the past six months Nike.com generated 993.85 tonnes of CO₂
  
  

Early Stages

An early Nike OS concept based on early MS DOS terminals and ASCII, searching for a lo-fi homebrew look and feel.

Results

We developed three concepts, built two and hosted them on a Raspberry Pi. The final build combined all sustainable design principles to create an extremely lightweight landing page with maximum visual impact. Creating a website with a 98.72% smaller carbon impact in 3 weeks, this was proof of sustainable impact. 

• Dark mode exclusively
• Dithered images
• Progressive loading 
• WebP optimised images
• Click to load content
• Reusable code blocks
• One system font, two weights
• SVG icons
• No video content
• An informative data panel showing the eco impact

Team:
Marie Vodickova, Robin Hunter, Liam Dean, James Penfold, Nick Voke.