Atoms
During the busy holiday season of 2021, I joined Atoms, a NYC-based sneaker start-up, full-time as their Senior Designer to plan and execute all graphic design tasks. I completed a rebranding of the entire company, branded a new shoe model, lead creative direction for marketing campaigns, instituted the design system for digital projects, and much more.
Hero image photographer: Julien Roubinet︎︎
The old logomark in place before I joined Atoms was an interlocked series of loops reminescent of a sacred geometry pattern called “flower of life” — pretty, but, a little complicated and many folks confused it for an icon of a flower. It also was nearly invisible on new outsole materials due to the strokes of the circles not having resilient scalability. In the new logomark, I simply “atomized” the old mark down to the essentials: dots. I wanted it to move from what seemed like a diagram of a part of an atom (the nucleus) to a very minimalist, pluralized abstract of what you might think atoms to be: swirling dots.
The full Atoms logo incorporates a modified version of Helvetica Now for the logotype. I wanted the tails of the lowercase “a” and “t” to be flatter — to look more like two feet of differing lengths (because this was an early value proposition of Atoms; you could order two different sized shoes since most people’s feet are actually not identical in length). I altered the “o” into a perfect circle on its exterior to match more with the logomark, and to feel just a bit more open and geometric.
With the new logomark being dots, we also had the option to render it “in void” — that is, hole-punched in various materials. This ensured that it was more visible on places like the bottom of the shoe. I also wanted to make the mark symmetrical; the logomark can be imprinted in dirt or sand without fear of it being flipped.
Alongside the logo, I focused on elevating the brand’s typography. I commissioned the Very Cool font foundry to finish VC Garamond Condensed (which would have remained incomplete had I not reached out) and then utilized it as Atoms’ primary headline typeface.
Continually throughout 2022, I worked on the Atoms website, and made it utilize an all-new design system for its various e-commerce components. I also lead many efforts to update and produce new creative assets for Atoms products that were inline with the enhanced visual identity we started to cultivate.
Art direction for new, hi-res product photography and on-model video for use across social, paid media, and product detail pages. In the videos, I aimed to highlight the new shoe’s effortless and flexible t-shirt-like properties.
Atoms opened a flagship store on 27 Mercer St, New York, NY after my involvement. They utilized a simple sign with the Atoms logomark above the front door, and other branded decals adorned glass on the outside and inside of the space. It doubled as an event space and a shoe store in lower Manhattan.
While I worked at Atoms, a secret shoe collaboration project was ongoing with Marques Brownlee, also known as MKBHD, the most popular tech YouTuber in the world with over 17 million subscribers. I had created a combination of a “dot parallelogram” — referencing MKBHD’s logomark — with the Atoms logomark to symbolize the collaboration, and it made its way onto the shoe. The size label which I also designed was stitched to the outside of the tongue and got a print of MKBHD’s signature added to it. This was a major shoe launch for the brand and advertisements for it appeared in Times Square, New York.