I am often asked what inspires my design aesthetic and how images manifest. I’m a big fan of the patterns that occur in nature, and I use math heavily in the technical design that I first learned and used when I worked as an architect. I admittedly take pointers from the Catalan Art Nouveau style of my favorite designer, Antoni Gaudí, famed Catalan architect. Gaudí leveraged anthropomorphism and flowing organic surfaces while employing some of the strongest mathematical forms in nature. His famous Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, consists of massive facades including huge towers with silhouettes that follow an inverted catenary arch.
The towers were designed through silhouette and volume studies that Gaudi made by hanging chains and weights on strings upside down in architectural scale models. The result was catenary arches or parabolas capable of supporting immense compression forces. The catenary curve is the graph of the hyperbolic cosine function.
Other mathematical forms used in Gaudi’s work include paraboloids, hyperboloids, helicoids, and ellipsoids, among others. Examples of his work and these geometries can be found here.
I also seek out patterns that occur in nature that can inform my design themes. I find inspiration in the patterns and the detail they provide. The Fibonacci sequence is a great example of this, and is heavily used in the design world as The Golden Ratio.
We can commonly see the Fibonacci sequence in pinecones, seed patterns that grow on sunflowers, seashells, flower petals, tree branches, and much more.
As someone who works in the footwear and apparel industry (previously at Nike, and now for On Running), I enjoy experimenting with my own footwear design concepts. For my daily work, I create the design software that’s then used by the professional footwear designers. Much of my time is spent identifying and building critical workflows that span from new product concepts to being able to update familiar products for the next season. The software I build with designers, engineers, and production teams must enable both creativity and technical scalability, all the way to a handoff point for manufacturing partners to work their magic. The vital aspect in building software is enabling freedom in creativity for designers while empowering the workflows with data and interoperability in the design and manufacturing processes. Without this, even the most meticulously designed technical tools will fall short for the product creation communities I serve.
My roots in architecture give me the foundation I need to understand many different design processes, and apply the theory in practice for proportion, color, materiality, and light. I believe my knowledge of math supports expanded feature functionality throughout the software application, and has a cascading effect that enables empowered virtual workflows. It could be present in the measure of the immersive studio lighting of 3D models, or in the conglomerate of geometries in 2D and 3D technical drawings, to the reflectivity or absorption in virtual materials applied to 3D products to produce virtual images. Without this varied understanding of math applied visually and in code to produce images, the end software product would be much less capable and impactful for designers.
In the following concept I consider a pinecone and its volume and flow of scales across the shoe surface. By mixing in fractal forms of different sizes that originate from the original pinecone scales, the transition to other geometries helps delineate a flow of the shoe components.
The following concept shows a much more over-the-top use of large-scale Fibonacci wave patterns for both the upper and the sole. I hoped to convey a soft and cushiony shoe.
The ultimate fractal example - and vegetable - that is often seen in your grocery store is Romanesco broccoli. The cone-shaped florets grow in a logarithmic spiral that entrances every time. The following concepts are a mix of the macro and micro patterns. Some include scaled-up micro patterns that define a larger structure. Features include fractalized detail and cone voids that form waves.
Admittedly, these knit footwear concepts push the limits and lean toward a look that is more alien, but perhaps it’s fitting considering the fantastic look of Romanesco broccoli. I enjoy the boundaries these shoes push, not only for the non-standard forms and patterns, but also the materiality, blending a mix of hard and soft components flowing into one-another. The resulting mathematical convergence of Fibonacci and fractals provide looks not commonly seen in footwear, that still reach back to my love of the natural world and the hidden and not-so-hidden math right in front of us every day.
Nick designs and builds software and workflows with teams in the footwear and apparel industry. 2D and 3D math concepts allow him to adeptly fuel the digital creation community, which helps them consistently create their best physical product for consumers.