Star Power!

So I think it's been long enough that I can post these here without any trouble. When I graduated college in 09 I got scooped up pretty quickly by Converse (The shoe people) to work for them as a designer on the Chuck Taylor women's team. I worked there for almost two years before leaving to work in animation (My twue wuv), but not before making a literal mountain of shoes for ladies and children. Believe me, I have my samples from China I rescued all shoved into a huge storage box.
Anyway, the best, longest project I got to work on was an initiative for girls that was character based. I worked on it for a whole year all by myself, from concept, character design, color, patterns, promotion, to branding, Chuck Taylor pretty much left me giddily alone in a cubical to do whatever I want. I even created a custom font for the project, which has long been a salivating want of mine. I named the project "Star Power", a line of customizable shoe's for girls. I am really tickled to death that it took off and did super well in market, and even got an awesome write up in seventeen magazine, which is hilarious to my inner awkward teenager in huge baggy hoodie. Here is the write up if you're interested. The image I've posted above are the original colors, which were modified a bit to fit specific pantone colors for fabrics. Please check out the whole project at the Converse site here! Below two of the many promo things from the web.

There was even early on supposed to be an exclusive poster print that comes with each, but it got vetoed for problematic shipping reasons. I designed the posters myself, and each girl had a spotlighted edition with special colors and an embarrassingly cutesy poem I wrote myself that was read out loud in a room full of global marketing while I contemplating jumping out the window screaming.

I am very proud that I can finally post all this here after having had to keep it wrapped up for a couple years. I made a big effort to create each character with positive traits and design elements, as well as subtley making them of diverse ethnicities without being it being overt. Something I often do in my own work that I wanted to bring here (other then the obvious vinyl toy love, haha) was to make all of their skin bright, fun, intense colors. I didn't want any particular girl not to be able to identify with a Star Power character on a purely racial basis. I hope I was able to achieve this in a positive way.

And they are EMBROIDERED. Titter titter.

Hopefully I'll be able to post some more of my Converse work soon. Cheers!