Pencils, Pens & Paper?

Tinker Hatfield designing the Nike Vapor 9 on his iPad

This following extract is taken from an interview with Tinker Hatfield:

“A couple of years ago, I sat down with Roger Federer in Paris after the French Open and designed a shoe right in front of him on the iPad in like 30 minutes. He was like, ‘How did you do that?’”

“I had a meeting with him, and I sketched the shoe right in front of him. I then went back to my hotel, dolled it up a little bit more and sent it back to him. So, he got another drawing that was even more wild, and he freaked out. He couldn’t believe it. That’s the Vapor 9. For tennis, it’s a revolutionary, new shoe.” 

It's hard not to admire the creative and technical abilities of Tinker Hatfield. His ability to design a shoe within the time constraints of an hour certainly flirts with the rhetoric of hyperbole. At the same time it raises the issue of where and what exactly eats up so much time to keep the sneaker enthusiasts waiting for a new release... production, advertising, testing? Who knows?

Digressions aside, I simply wanted to illustrate the "Tinker Way" of old, where images are more powerful than the word and what is achievable with a pencil, pen and some paper.

On top of that there is more than one way to skin a cat...