Carolyn Davidson billed Nike $2 an hour for 17.5 hours of work on its new shoe logo in 1971, which came to $35. Phil Knight, the company’s co-founder, looked at what she handed him and admitted he did not love it, though he thought it would grow on him.
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Davidson was a design student at Portland State University at the time, not a working designer. Knight had overheard her telling a friend at the university that she needed money for an oil painting class, and over the following months she took on graphs and spreadsheets for the young sportswear label before he asked her for a logo.
She produced several options, among them a simple circle and a shape she called “the stripe”, the name the design carried before anyone called it the swoosh. Nike wanted something that read as movement, and Davidson tested candidate shapes by holding cut tissue paper against prototype shoes to see how each one looked at speed. Its long, tapering line was meant to suggest that motion directly, though some who have studied it since have also read it as the shape of a wing on a statue of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
The design reached the track within a year. Among the leading American runners at the 1972 Boston Marathon, two wore Nike shoes marked with the new swoosh as they finished.
What Davidson was paid later
Nike did not leave the $35 as the final word. In 1983, Knight gave Davidson a diamond and gold ring engraved with a swoosh, another cheque for $35, and 500 shares in the company. The Guardian reported that the stock she was eventually given came to be worth well over half a million dollars.
Davidson has said seeing the swoosh on television still gives her “a good feeling inside”, a reaction she described in a 2011 interview marking the design’s 40th anniversary. Knight came round to it in the end too. “It did grow on me,” he said later. What the mark was meant to stand for, he added, was speed.
