Creating Custom Basketball Sneakers on NikeID.com

NIKEiD.com Lets Anyone Create Custom-Designed Athletic Shoes

Though it is easy enough to find athletic shoes in retail stores, these shoes may not match your personal style, which is where NIKEiD.com comes in handy. Using the following steps on the Web site, you can create a unique pair of shoes for yourself or someone special.

NIKEiD Step No.1: Choose Your Language

On the first screen, choose a language (English, Spanish, etc.) from the drop-down menu and then, in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, click on "myLOCKER".

NIKEiD Step No. 2: Sign Up

While on the "myLOCKER" screen, click on "Sign Up" and enter your personal information (name, address, etc.) and create a user id and login. The registration process creates myLOCKER, a place to store your designs until you're ready to buy them. There's an additional option to create a "teamLOCKER" for group and team designs, which is a good choice for members of a team who want to personalize their own shoes.

NIKEiD Step No. 3: Get Down to Designing

The design screen offers a choice of men's or women's shoes, so I clicked on "Men's" and accessed a drop-down menu. At this point, you have to select one of the Nike styles, so for the purpose of this demonstration, I chose Nike Shox NZ ID. To start designing, click on the blank shoe at the left side of the screen and the selected style will appear on your screen.

NIKEiD Step No. 4: Choose a Color

NIKEiD allows designers to add up to seven colors to each pair of shoes. As you add colors, the shoe on the screen changes to reflect your selections. For my personal design, I made the following choices:

a) Base color: midnight navy
b) Secondary color: altitude green (this color appears on the outside over the base color)
c) Nike swoosh color: varsity red
d) Accent color: black (the accent outlines the swooshes)
e) Lace color: hoop orange
f) Lining color: shy pink
g) Shox color: hoop orange to match the laces (the shox look like little shock absorbers on the back end of the shoe).

NIKEiD Step No. 5: Make the Shoes More Personal

At this point, you can personalize the back of each shoe with your own logo of up to 8 characters. In a bold and daring move, I put "Steven" on the left shoe and "Bryan" on the right.