words_Nick DePaula photography_Zac Dubasik For the second year in a row, Nike’s Future Sole design competition offered aspiring designers a chance to show off their talents in front of the brand’s biggest names during the Future Sole Finals. The brainchild of Jordan Brand’s Design Director, D’Wayne Edwards, this year Future Sole saw a huge increase in interest and participation from around the country. Last year, their website received a modest 50,000 hits throughout the project’s early summer to fall timeline, and this year the views skyrocketed to over 250,000 hits. Add in an increase of 4,500 registered users from last year’s 800 and 274 submissions as compared to last year’s crop of 149 entries, and in just a year the Future Sole design competition had taken a major leap. While last year’s contest came down to just two finalists, and eventual co-winners, in Juan Carlos Pozo and Ben Adams-Keane, this year there would be an entirely new structure in place, breaking the competition down into two categories: Jordan Brand and Nike Basketball. After making it through a strenuous voting process that weighed the votes of campus employees as well as the voice of the public, both Austin Jermacans and Daniel Gold were announced as finalists in the Jordan Brand category towards the end of the summer. Held in Beaverton, Oregon on Nike’s sprawling campus, the Finals would challenge each designer with creating a unique twist on the upcoming Jordan Melo M6 and presenting their worthy entry to a panel of fifteen judges made up of Nike’s top design executives and even a few internet bloggers like myself. Both Jermacans and Gold were given the same brief, to design a performance hoops shoe fit for the demands of Carmelo Anthony, and from there each designer worked with their mentors through a series of phone calls and emails to refine their concepts and sketches. “Both of them had the same information at the beginning about what Melo wants and what he looks for and about his style,” explains Justin Taylor, Jordan Brand Designer and the man behind the M6. “His style has evolved and he’s a lot more clean cut and he wants to be a little bit more sophisticated and streamlined.
