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JT Collect by OGJ is a Grotesk applied at global sportswear brand NIKE.
Designer and Art Director Interview with Redwan El-Harrak (for Sang Bleu), who played a central role at the Nike LDN Capsule Collection — designed for the 2019 London Marathon.
OGJ: Welcome Red, thanks for taking time for an interview regarding the excellent job you did at the Nike project! Please tell us more about why you chose Collect and how you worked with it.
RED: No problem and thank you for the kind words. Collect was an easy choice to make and was a design decision made pretty quickly actually. The breadth of the Collect family meant that was a lot of different personalities to pick from and I instantly felt that the Max style had a certain energy that aligned perfectly to the Nike brand — in a way it felt like it always belonged to that world once I saw it in the design. The Max Italic in particular added some movement with its inclusion.
Both the Max and Max Italic weights were used for the wordmark and during the design process Maxime Büchi and I realised that the symmetrical N leant itself cleverly as a connector for LDN and RUN.
In the end the concept leant heavily on Collect, with the typeface doing a lot of the work.
OGJ: Can you tell us more about the illustration concept?
RED: Well the illustration was kind of the first starting point of the concept. In my mind I wanted to show London as a deconstructed landscape with the fragments that could fill a runner’s environment, which is experienced in almost a distorted sense due to being on the move. So we have architectural scraps of Big Ben and other quintessential monuments of London sitting on top of humble newsagents and chicken shops.
I knew straight away who I wanted to commission with Stijn Jonckheere and his style essentially being the baseplate of the concept.
Once we had that part of the puzzle figured out, that’s when we moved onto the type work and where Collect also really helped. So on one hand the typeface felt very connected to the Nike brand but also sat well with Stijn’s work and he did an excellent job integrating and embedding it as a graphic device into his airy yet industrial aesthetic.
OGJ: Do you see the other weights being able to work to give different personalities?
RED: Absolutely. It was the biggest draw for me in the first place as part of the design process — it’s really useful to have a type family such as the Collect on hand as it allows me to test ‘personas’ out quickly; changing the weights, playing with the tracking and typesetting etc in order to find the right feeling within some set parameters.
I can see it being applied in a multitude of ways. Ranging from very functional contexts right up to more display led use in editorials and posters. Then you have the possibilities of packaging, branding and so on – if anything kudos to you Oliver for creating such a great family.
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Pair JT Collect with a condensed cut of the Trade Gothic.
With the Caslon.
Pairs also very well with a traditional Chinese, Japanese or Arabic type.