Trust The Process: 2D to 3D
An Exploration of Possibilities
Words by Grace Warn
Whether you have invested your money in NFTs, clicked the follow button of accounts like @finnrushtaylorstudio or @proto_hypes, or, your jaw hit the floor when Heron Preston x Zellerfeld was released, you’re well on the way to becoming a 3D design enthusiast. And, you are definitely not the only one. With Gravity Sketch and Modo becoming mainstays on the desktops of some of the most influential designers and rendering becoming the norm, 3D design is giving sketching a run for its money.
With both flat and ‘floating’ design processes culminating in the same finished products, how do the two processes compete? Here, CONCEPTKICKS investigates the parallels, dissonance and development of both design practices to see how modern footwear has evolved to both accept and reject the different formats equally.
“I have been sketching from such a young age, it doesn’t matter where I am I’m always carrying a pen and paper. There is a certain tactility to the process, you can feel the tension between the pen and paper, that’s what makes me passionate about it,” opens CONCEPTKICK’S own Daniel Bailey who bypasses the formal atmosphere of our interview as soon as his mind was set on design.
Working with artists and designers such as Takashi Murakami and Heron Preston, Bailey has always started with a pen to paper to create final products that play with and elevate the visions of the brands he works with. Bailey continues: “It’s a really efficient way for me to get to a point where I feel really confident that I can show my idea to someone else and they are going to understand exactly what I have in mind.” Call it ideation or brain dump, Bailey sticks to what he knows: “If you look at my notebook now, it’s just a bunch of scribbles. It’s all about getting the idea down.”
From this notebook - which by the way, we would all love to get our hands on - Bailey transposes his ideas onto screen, using Adobe software to build his design digitally. This is the largely accepted way of designing footwear these days, and it’s what the millennial generation of designers have fine-tuned. Jose Monroy, Footwear Designer and Director at bootmakers Ariat, explains: “My generation of designers rely on Illustrator as their building blocks, now we are at this transition where the generation after us are learning 3D as their foundation.”
You don’t have to be a design devotee to see that a bridge is being built between the camps, and Monroy is part of the pack leading the way to unchartered territory. Last year, he pushed himself to get to grips with GravitySketch after witnessing how his colleagues were harnessing the power of digital: “For a long time, all of the big designers were posting things on Instagram in 2D and almost overnight they transitioned to 3D. People were pushing their designs to new worlds and I was obsessed by how easy it seemed.”
Ease is the word when it comes to designers who are fluent in 3D. Cornelius Schmitt, who quite easily earns the role of leader of the 3D world says: “If you are fluent in 3D you can experiment much more with shape and proportions than you can when you sketch.” Schmitt, who has expanded his empire of 3D printers in unimaginable ways since we last spoke to him, is dedicated to facilitating the digital takeover. Combining his innovative engineering, state-of-the-art 3D printers and newly launched foot scanning app, Schmitt has become indispensable to the designers who want to get their teeth stuck into futuristic possibilities.
Monroy and Bailey agree with the founder of Zellerfeld’s proposition of playing with proportions. The former says: “Designing in 3D allows me to see how the pieces of the shoe come together. A sketch might look pretty but once you start to put the shoe together in real life, you realise that the components don’t go together that easily!.” And the latter, despite being dedicated to sketching, says “3D is the next level of sketching without having to do a million overlays. I can play with proportions really easily, which is very important to my concept process because a lot of my designs have a dramatic perspective.”
But, does the same sentiment ring true when it comes to large scale production and design? Kostika Spaho, Digital Transformation Lead at Keen Footwear is staying true to singing 3D’s praises too. Having formed the brand’s first 3D innovation team and programme five years ago, Spaho has seen the design process take over the whole Keen supply chain. “At the beginning, it was a total experiment. Today, we are a team that services lots of the supply chain from design to e-commerce and marketing.”
“Integrating 3D is shortening our timelines because every level of production can make decisions more quickly. Due to Covid, our teams reduced and we were forced to find a solution to make things quicker and easier. Our solution was to get the designers to start rendering and changing the materials on the 3D models themselves,’ Spaho explains before confessing that implementation of the programmes was a lot harder than he first made it out to be. He continues: “Introducing it to the design team was difficult because we had to do it while people were still on their traditional timelines.”
After some digging, it seems that this isn’t the only hurdle that hits footwear designers when they venture into new realms, “Learning 3D design formats is like learning an entirely new language. It makes footwear design more accessible but I wouldn’t say that it makes it easy,” says Daniel Bailey who prefers to outsource to people who have meticulously trained and honed their skills. From Blender to GravitySketch, I have tried my hand at software in tandem with this exploration and can agree. Whether it’s daunting load ups or getting accustomed to the sensitivity of the programmes my limited two-hour experiences with the applications left me confused a points and bemused at others.
Safa Sahin, Head of Sneaker Design at Balmain also works with a specialised team of 3D designers to get his last-designed concepts formulated. He explains: “I work closely with 3D for at least 10 hours otherwise they don’t understand my vision. When I say closely, I have to sit right beside them which does slow my production process down.” That doesn’t stop him from creating the technical files for 3D printing shoes to sit on the feet of clients including Lady Gaga. The singer herself picked a favourite of Sahin’s otherworldly designs from his Instagram, a personal archive he keeps for concepts of shoes he has worked on and wants to build in the future.
Futuristic characterises the design vernacular that encompasses a large amount of the 3D design concepts we are all seeing these days, shoes that look like they suit Mars better than planet Earth is the norm. The novelty of the designs is a product of the newness of the programmes, Monroy says: “It’s a new toy so people are creating crazy concepts that will probably be on our feet in the next five to ten years thanks to 3D printers, ease of design process and customisation.”
Zellerfeld is at the forefront of making this happen. Slowly but surely, the footwear industry is witnessing more and more products come out of Cornelius Schmitt’s factory of innovations. Designs that not only reframe the way we all consider footwear and challenge the boundaries of sustainability, collaboration and ergonomics. One of Schmitt’s main objectives is to create a footwear industry where designers are not limited by their knowledge of the production process and minimum order quantities, he sees a future where creatives are solely reliable on themselves and a printer. “I don’t think that designers should have to worry about the intricacies of traditional footwear designs. When you are driving a car, you don’t need to understand how the gearbox works! That’s why so many designers cannot be independent right now, they have to rely on all of the other people in the production line which hampers innovation and great design.”
To write a conclusion to this investigation is almost bittersweet and one that I cannot provide a finite answer for. It’s one that’s bubbling with nuanced conversations and disruptive design ideas that prove to be just the beginning of something much bigger. As the industry shifts to adapt to new ways of working, a new era of digital 3D design is taking hold however for those that champion sketching as their starting point, the power still lies in their pencil. Daniel Bailey states the finisher for this, "A bad idea that is rendered really nicely is still a bad idea and a great idea that is sketched badly is still a great idea.”