Nike: Maxims Website Design

Designing a robust interactive hub for the entire Nike staff to participate
in their annual internal Global Maxim Award Show.

For Nike, the ‘Maxims’ are the core company values segmented into five phrases that describe the mindset and ethos that all employees aspire to.

These values are then highlighted yearly at the Global Maxim Awards where each Maxim is awarded to a team that excelled in that segment. Teams are nominated by team leaders and executives who then select a set of five finalists for each Maxim to then be voted on by the entire 80,000+ staff. 

The process began with learning and understanding the Nike culture and the Maxims process, which included plenty of research and information mapping.

With a solid base and direction to design in, I explored multiple creative directions focused around maxims education, and the voting portion of the site.

Part of this exploration included establishing a unique visual perspective within the overall Nike Maxim visual center, this included texture and styling elements in addition to branding. I also explored multiple UX approaches to the voting cadence of the site. Understanding the different perspectives of employees visiting the site was key to finding solutions and multiple ways into the site. Within all the exploration some elements, like the slide out menu, became core elements of the final design.

The final design was routed in the 50th anniversary Nike visual center. This featured hand drawn elements, simplified typography, and a natural flow of content.

The Voting phase of the site was the most robust, containing over 30 individual pages, applied across all screen sizes and translated into 20 different languages. 

The design featured a more natural cadence showcasing each maxim finalists in an individualized way giving employees a high level view of each finalists. There were multiple paths to casting a vote giving all team members an opportunity to look at things at varying levels. The slide out menu was key to allowing people to flow through the site and easily check their voting progress.

Our dev team worked wonders to take all the designs, built in Figma, and translate them 1:1 within the nike development process. Seeing the design translated so seamlessly gave us a lot of confidence that the site would be well received and highly used.

We meticulously tweaked the size, scale, and layout of type and images to ensure the site looked great in all translated languages.

This website was created to serve as the hub for all things Maxims, swapping through phases leading up to the Global Maxim Award Show giving all team members across the globe a place to participate and feel more connected.

The site exceeded the goals set by the Nike team seeing the largest participation in maxim award voting ever. This all lead up to the actual award show where the award winners were presented for each of the 5 Maxims.

Though we weren’t done as the next phase of the site was pushed live showcasing the new winners, keeping all the finalists viewable and still serving as the hub for all things Maxims. This would then remain as the evergreen version of the site until next year when the voting process begins again.

This project was a huge undertaking for me. I worked as the primary UX/UI designer throughout the process and worked close with the dev team to ensure everything looked great inside and out. I also learned how to design and prototype in Figma for this project, a much needed addition to my design toolkit.

  • Art Direction, UI Design, UX Design, Conceptual Design, Asset Production.

  • mid 2022 With Plastic Sunshine

  • Louis Carlton Executive Creative Director

    Jessica Davis: Creative Director

    Kelly Ongkowidjojo: Designer