#210820: Cultsport V-Man Amp Running Shoe
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March 2021 -November 2021
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Cult.Fit/CultSport is an India local fitness startup company.
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Product and design consulting
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To design a collection of 6 running silhouettes and 2 new toolings for local India market.
This is the sixth running silhouette of my design project with Cult.fit. The past five running silhouette designs are clean and straight forward in terms of upper design language. I want to make this design a bit more fun and to apply a little sophistication to upper design. I just want to design an upper using layering as design interest.
Like all past 5 silhouette designs client’s limited resources and budgets is still a main considering fact which means that I am not able to use any high tech advanced materials. One of the design methods that can elevator a design utilizing the most basic materials in ten folds is layering. This method largely is sort of based on graphic design as key. Layering is one of the most fun upper design methods. I did one of the FILA silhouette in this fashion. You can check it out here.
With this layering design method a designer can have unlimited amount of imaginations. When layering is done correctly the design can look extremely entertaining yet still very complete as one unified piece. When I design a layering upper I like to think myself designing a big puzzle where I can create any visual image I like. Just like a traditional jigsaw board game once all little pieces are put together correctly a visual graphic/photo image reveals itself.
Unlike a two dimension jigsaw puzzle game which is played on a flat surface a designer can apply multi-surfaced information (materials/colors/graphics, etc.) to a shoe upper design. When these layering information are applied correctly a shoe upper has a strong visual aesthetic. After all surface information put together the upper has a subtle visual depth.
In this running shoe upper design I set out to have a three layer (surfaces) construction to complete this upper “puzzle”. A backing inner layer; an outer surface layer and an overlay trim layer where each layer has its own design information (material, color, graphic etc.).However, even within these layerings, there is a design concentration point. In this upper design is client’s V-Man brand logo which the rest of the upper designs is the extension of the logo itself.
From these prototype sample one can clearly see that even though the upper has a lot of pieces yet the visual aesthetic is not messy at all, instead the upper is very complete as one single unified piece. After several initial concept drawings, I focused on a silhouette where the inner underlay cut-out graphic reflects the star burst effect of the V-Man logo. In order to have the logo really blending into the underlay graphic cut-outs, I even added the smallest cut-outs within the V-Man itself.
With the outer layer material being a translucent single nylon mesh the cut-outs is clearly seen from afar. This translucent nylon mesh also provides a breathability which functions as ventilation points.
Then I added the overlay trims to three areas, toe cap; heel counter and eye-stay. These trimming overlays not only add visual interests but also provide additional form support.
Even within the overlay trimming there are two separate layers which each has its own information. In this case I added branding based fine graphics focusing on running aesthetics which these fine graphics technically is any layer of information on its own. Furthermore I added very fine polka dots to the V-Man logo itself which make the logo blending into the entire upper much better.
