Concrete Summer
The second issue of the adidas Originals Series showed up, and it was actually well-designed, which isn’t something you’d normally say about a brand publication. Someone spent real time on it, made choices about materials and images because they mattered, not because they fit the brand guidelines.
The main feature is called The Concrete Jungle.
It’s a summer fashion editorial, but the photography captures something specific about urban heat and fatigue—that exhaustion you get when the season and the crowd wear on you at the same time, where the rhythm shifts and everything feels a little slower.
A World Cup feature pulls animal prints from team kits and uses them as source material for an illustration series. Conny Maier drew with those patterns as a starting point, and the work has this quality of being genuinely strange—not the generic design stuff you’d expect from a brand campaign. The animal patterns become their own language, weird enough to make you double-take.
I’ve spent enough time with design and magazines to know when someone’s done the work. This felt like that. It could’ve been disposable, another piece of marketing to flip through and forget. Instead it has the quality of something worth keeping, worth opening again just to look at how it was made.