NIKE
Capturing the power of sport for all athletes
For nearly fifty years, NIKE has upheld a belief in the power of sport to break barriers and inspire athletes* everywhere. In close partnership with NIKE’s communications team, AREA 17 was tasked to create a vibrant and holistic corporate platform that celebrates the power of sport.
Working to consolidate three siloed corporate websites, our team created a centralized and singularly original platform––using our open source CMS toolkit, Twill––that brings dimension to the everyday ways NIKE serves athletes*, communities, and the world. Inspiring users with meaningful, informative content and calls to action, the improved platform also aims to empower NIKE’s in-house communications team with a refreshed editorial strategy.
NIKE About is made with Twill, our open-source CMS for Laravel.
Our platform consolidates NIKE’s corporate websites into a centralized hub which consists of three editorial sections: Stories, a bi-annual digital magazine that covers a theme relevant to NIKE’s current focus; an Impact hub that captures the scope of NIKE’s efforts to break barriers around the world; and a Newsroom that hosts NIKE’s launches, announcements, reports and statements fresh for journalists. Together with Nike, we identified a throughline to guide our structure: impact. We wanted to subvert the bland corporate website model by not just telling users NIKE’s mission statement, but showing how NIKE makes good on their intentions.
Creating a centralized narrative strategy allowed us to unite disparate content into a powerful story; the editorial features we introduced help NIKE continue to tell that story with ease, while improving user flow and discovery.
With Spotlights and Q & A’s conducted with NIKE athletes and employees from around the world, the site feels intimate and human-centered. In the Impact Hub, Commitments are broken down with transparent statistics that show NIKE’s progress in reaching their goals; initiatives and guides are also available to empower users to make an impact. The newsroom lets visitors download relevant assets and press kits, facilitating an easy experience for the media.
NIKE Inc. needed a unique but related visual identity to complement its retail brand, one that would set it apart as the editorial voice of NIKE Inc. This meant playing with the NIKE typography from the retail site to give it an editorial tilt and experimenting with the standard color palette, while using UI elements as a connective thread between the two sites.
The new Nike corporate website is a bespoke, customizable system built with Twill, AREA 17’s own open-source CMS tool kit. We introduced Twill to improve content publishing and curating for Nike’s communication team, and to allow for autonomous CMS development in the future.
To streamline NIKE’s publishing workflow, AREA 17 developed a purposeful Twill extension from the ground-up. We introduced the concept of ‘simultaneous drafts’, where editors can make revisions to a published story, without it affecting the live version. We also enriched the lifecycle of Twill content so that it could be submitted for approval by the core publishing team.
