Assignment 11

According to Heller the concept of mainstream vs underground is relevant in contemporary design, because of the constant stealing of ideas from the underground by people in the mainstream. Heller continues to talk about how they will alter the work slightly if even that, then they reissue them, to the world as new products. As a result, sometimes the original work goes unnoticed while the copy gets a lot of credit. As a designer I couldn’t say I didn’t know that these types of things go on. It’s understandable to get inspiration from past products but to take old ideas and copy them just isn’t right and has a bad effect on the design world. For one when doing this you’re not really being creative and before you know it everyone will all have designs that look almost the same, which gets boring and would eventually lose the attention of the audience because it doesn’t intrigue them anymore. What gets your audience and get people looking at what your doing is your unique style and how you present things to them, it’s all about standing out.

For my presentation I will be doing a set of Nike posters from the 1990s, I wouldn’t say they necessarily stole ideas from the underground but used the fashion trends from the underground and incorporated these trends into their brand. Also, in some of the commercials they used popular hip-hop music and other genre to get the attention of the audience they wanted. they used athletes like Michael Jordan and celebrity like Spike Lee. When it comes to the designer, the phrase that he used was “Just Do It”. He stole this slogan from a man named Gary Gilmore, who when on death row said, “let’s do it”. Dan Wieden then took off lets and added just and that’s how Nike came up with there famous slogan. That’s one of the only times I can think of when they stole an idea or altered one to make a new product or campaign.

The specific posters I chose was the collaborations between Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. When reading an article on what was the inspiration for the ad campaign, I found they were trying to sell Michael Jordan sneakers, there were a bunch of Michael Jordan sneakers coming out at this time. When doing this Nike tried to tap into the “Sneaker Head Culture”. The shoe industry was growing fast, and people started to have somewhat of an addiction to shoes. Most people were fine with a couple pairs of sneakers, but some people were collecting more than a hundred pairs of shoes. Nike did an amazing job at marketing Jordans sneaker to the “Sneaker head Culture” and they took ideas from underground culture and alter certain things to make their ads more intriguing to the sneaker culture. I would say that this approach shaped the mainstream by showing companies in general that they can take styles and different concepts from the underground to help improve their consumer intake.

Sources:

https://nike-justdoit.weebly.com/influence-on-pop-culture.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneaker_collecting

https://nike-justdoit.weebly.com/influence-on-pop-culture.html