Prototype Basketball Black is a throwback to Ray Gun Magazine-style grunge type of the 1980s and 90s. The highly-textured typeface was custom designed for Nike Basketball’s 2022 All Star Weekend campaign, which included out-of-home advertising and Nike Air Zoom GT Jump product stills.

It is intended to be used as a heavy, black weight of Palatino Light (Nike’s brand typeface) and reflects the thinking behind Nike Global’s typographic approach, which mixes textured “hand-drawn” type with their primary typeface. 

The “weight” of the typeface comes from a buildup of basketball texture. Individual characters were drawn with irregular patterns, with special attention paid to the way that textures would co-mingle between letterforms. As a result, Prototype Black Basketball is a typeface that does not look like a typeface. Instead, it has the appearance of a handmade, imperfect imprint that is reminiscent of the artifact found in printing processes and digitally- degraded imagery.

Prototype Black Basketball is a highly functional typeface, in spite of its irregular appearance. As a black weight within a larger type family, it features a basic character set and shares the same metrics as Palatino Light. The two weights can be set together to create seamless lockups with minimal typographic interventions.

The typeface is a conceptual extension of the visual direction in Nike’s 2022 All Star Weekend campaign. Prototype Black Basketball complements the hand-drawn annotations, collaged cutouts and abstract halftone textures of the highly-tactile campaign visuals.