Nike asked me to redesign a classic logo. (And why I told them not to use it.)

Client

Jordan Brand – Nike Inc.
Brand DevelopmentPackagingPrint
air jordan 1 in hand
The Brief

Nike’s Jordan Brand came to me with a precise creative challenge. The team felt the original Air Jordan wings logo, designed by Peter Moore in 1984 for Michael Jordan’s first signature shoe, needed a refresh.

The direction was specific: keep every element of the original. The wings, the wordmark, the overall architecture. But reimagine them as modern, smooth, and aerodynamic. Remove the rawness. Elevate everything. The inspiration they asked me to draw from was avionics and high-end automotive design. Aston Martin. Bentley. Brands where precision engineering and visual refinement communicate excellence without trying.

Jordan Brand was not positioning itself alongside other athletic companies. It was positioning itself to challenge and dominate the luxury category. The mark needed to reflect that ambition and the excellence of the greatest basketball player of all time.

air jordan 1 logo on a shoe
THE WORK

I started where every identity problem starts: understanding what the mark had to do, not just what it had to look like. The original Peter Moore logo had accumulated twenty years of cultural weight. Every line carried history. Before I changed anything I needed to understand what I was actually dealing with.

Then I got to work. Nearly a hundred sketches. Every direction explored with intention, nothing discarded thoughtlessly, nothing kept without purpose. The goal was to honor the architecture of the original while elevating every detail to the standard the brief demanded.

The final mark delivered. The wings were cleaner, more aerodynamic, more precise. The letterforms were refined and authoritative. It carried the quiet confidence of a luxury brand.

The Jordan team loved it.

THE RECOMMENDATION

I told them not to use it.

In my recommendation I pointed to something no competitive analysis or brand audit could fully quantify: the people who love Jordan Brand love it enough to tattoo it across their entire back. Forever. That level of devotion doesn’t attach to shoes and clothing. It attaches to a mythos. An embodiment of achievement and excellence that had been building since 1984.

The rawness of the original Peter Moore logo wasn’t a design flaw. It was the authenticity. It was the origin. It carried twenty years of that mythos in every imperfect line. The existing brand equity in that mark would be the envy of virtually any brand in the world, and its true value far exceeded anything visible on a balance sheet. More importantly in the long run, it was far more valuable to the brand’s fans.

A more elegant logo was better in theory. It was not a more valuable one.

The Jordan team agreed. The original stayed.

THE LESSON

The right answer for a client is not always what they originally thought they wanted. Most of the time I’m building it for them. Sometimes, like here, it already exists.

I will always fight for the best outcome. Sometimes that means creating something new. Sometimes it means defending something irreplaceable.

Knowing the difference is the work.

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