Celebrating the city at the Shanghai Marathon

Nike’s sponsorship of the Shanghai Marathon provides them a valuable opportunity to highlight their brand amongst the Chinese running community. We were asked to develop an aesthetic identity for the race that celebrated the city’s athletic heritage and could be deployed across high-profile and varied applications.

Alongside Nike’s Brand Design team, we devised a visual identity that both reflected the competition’s energy and maintained the flexibility to incorporate Western and Chinese scripts.

We commissioned and directed typographers Six Station and Ryu Mieno in the creation of a series of posters that would be displayed on billboards, banners and signs along the marathon route, as well as at the Marathon Expo and online.

Artist Sodavekt designed an accompanying pattern that incorporated elements of the city as well as running imagery, recasting road markings, wayfinding signs and Shanghai architecture in Nike’s iconic Volt colourway. In order to enable its use on different surfaces it can be cropped without compromising design.

This bespoke Shanghai imagery resulted in high levels of brand exposure and commercial activity during the race, and encouraged several hundred participants to sign up to Nike+ apps as a result