Her process was to draw “a picture of a shoe and then I drew (logos) on tissue. Well, when you really love something, try to get somebody to look over here at something different.ĭavidson doodled for nearly three weeks, estimating she worked well over the 17.5 hours often touted, to come up with the logo. He loved the Adidas stripes, he loved them. Knight was particularly fond of the Adidas logo, and though he said it couldn’t look too similar to that, he was apparently enamored by it. He further instructed her that he wanted it to give the impression of motion. Thus, in 1971, Knight asked Davidson to design a “stripe”, which was the slang term at the time for a logo for a shoe. distributor of Japanese running shoes and, rather, producing and selling his own shoe lines. A few years later, Knight decided it was time to take his business to the next level, moving away from being just a U.S. Knight overheard and later approached her and asked her if she’d be interested in doing some graphics work for his business, offering her $2 an hour for the gig (about $14 per hour today).ĭavidson accepted and began doing various freelance jobs for Blue Ribbon Sports, mostly making charts and things of this nature. She was in the middle of a conversation with a fellow student in the graphics design department explaining that she didn’t have enough money to take an oil painting class. It was simply by chance that Davidson met Knight at all. (Blue Ribbon Sports primarily was a distributor of Onitsuka Tiger shoes from Japan.) On the side, Knight ran a business called Blue Ribbon Sports, the precursor to Nike. At the time she created the now world famous logo, Davidson was a student at Portland State University where one of the co-founders of Nike, Phil Knight, was teaching as an assistant professor in accounting. Today I found out the creator of the Nike “swoosh” logo was originally only paid $35 for it.

Nike logo design