adidas Ultraboost Bible

The brief

adidas launched Ultraboost and called it the greatest running shoe ever. It is a big claim to make about a trainer, and the first pairs went out, with a launch book, to the people most likely to test it: high-profile names who would wear the shoe, talk about it and be asked about it.

This is the launch book that went with those first pairs. Inside adidas it was called the Bible, and it had a different job from any other launch material. The people reading it did not need to be sold the shoe, because they already had it in the box. They needed to understand why adidas believed the claim, in a form they would actually open, read and keep.

That ruled out a brochure. A brochure lists features in order and expects to be skimmed. This had to be paced like a story, one idea at a time, and it had to look as confident as the claim on the front.

We designed all of it: the format, the page plan, the cover and every spread.

The approach

Flat yellow, the shoe, and four words: Your Greatest Run Ever. Nothing else on the cover but the badge and the hashtag. No product name, no specification, no price. The people reading it already had the shoe, so the cover only had to do one thing, which was to get them to open it.

Inside, the page plan does the work. Every spread takes one claim about the shoe and gives it the whole page, so nothing competes with it. A different colour sits behind each one, which means the book is paced by colour instead of by chapter. Turning the page is the change of subject, and the reader always knows where one idea stops and the next begins.

The colour sequence was planned across the whole book, not spread by spread, so the run of colours builds as you go through it and the numbers land late, once the reader has been told why they matter.

What was done

The spreads each carry a single idea. Energy Takes Over, with the shoe sat on black and white lines that seem to move. Born to Kill Convention. Maximum Boost. The Boost foam drawn as a sound wave. Then the numbers, on magenta: 20% more Boost cushioning, and a stretch web outsole that flexes underfoot.

We set the format, the page plan, the cover and every spread, and took the whole book through to artwork for print.

Stood on its end with the pages fanned, it shows what it is: yellow outside, a different colour on every spread inside. It was made to be kept on a shelf and shown to somebody else, which is the whole point of a launch book that goes to people who get asked about the shoe.