Legendary Nike shoe designer Tinker Hatfield considers freehand drawing essential to getting ideas out of his head and into collaborator's hands. "I think of myself a problem solver," he says, describing how he troubleshoots challenges by sketching concepts and exchanging them with colleagues and athletes, sometimes until 2 or 3 in the morning.
Almost 30 years ago, Hatfield, perhaps best known for his decades designing the venerable Air Jordan series, was handed such a problem by Robert Zemeckis. The filmmaker wanted him to design a pair of sneakers that would jibe with the hoverboard-riding future of 2015 envisioned by Back to the Future II. **His solution? The Nike Mag, a pair of power-lacing sneakers fit for Marty McFly himself.
But the Mag was just the beginning. Now Hatfield and his team have turned McFly's fictional high tops into the HyperAdapt 1.0, Nike's new---and decidedly real---self-lacing kicks. They're the culmination of a project Hatfield describes in this month's cover story as among the most difficult in the history of footwear.
And it all started with Hatfield's drawings. So for our October cover, WIRED asked Hatfield to sketch the HyperAdapt 1.0 and the inspirations that informed their look and feel. Check out Tinker’s work and WIRED’s two covers---one on newsstands and another for subscribers---in detail with the magnifying tool below.
