CCW visualise "strength as beauty" in their dynamic interpretation of an athlete's Journey To Greatness

Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon (CCW) are third up in our profiles of the exciting University of the Arts London graduates to interpret the unique brief Journey To Greatness brief set by Nike. Here’s how they got on…

The CCW team were fascinated by the unforgiving fragility of the concept of greatness, the fine line between success and failure and the idea of strength as beauty. They wanted to create a strong, dynamic visual and their design is an incredibly intense interpretation of these elements – a clash of two forms, the mangle and the balloon that wordlessly articulates the delicacy of elite level sport – one foot wrong and the dream can burst in an instant.

 “It was quite a simple approach,” they say. “After the briefing it started as a discussion of our shared interests and then we just played around with ideas and how to combine each individual’s skillset to create an outcome we could have equal involvement in.
 
“Matching the initial ambition of the idea with a well-crafted artwork was the biggest challenge. Another big challenge was trying to sum up greatness in one image that didn’t feel like a sporting cliché.”

Indeed translating ideas with which people will be quite familiar into an original image is no mean feat, but the CCW team managed to create a striking, compelling design which will speak to people on different levels. As much as anything it’s really beautiful on its own terms with the industrial mangle and the happy-go-lucky coloured party balloons contrasting to excellent effect.

And now it’s all over how do they feel about it? Proud, not just with having pulled off a tricky technical challenge but also of producing something that pushed the limits of the project.

“Bearing in mind that this was an artwork created by four people who met on the brief day and had different interests and, we are happy to have created an outcome that challenged the brief, the client and possibly even the typical Nike target audience."

All project photography by Ryan Hopkinson and project films by Andrew Telling. This article was produced in conjunction with Nike.