Drake Ramberg, the Designer Behind Football’s Most Iconic Nike Kits, Talks Venezia FC, NOCTA and a ’90s Revival

Few designers have left a fingerprint on football culture quite like Drake Ramberg.

Long before jerseys became front-row fashion statements and resale grails, Ramberg was rethinking what team kits could stand for – not just sportswear, but storytelling. An Oregon native, the ex-Nike designer’s near three-decades-long tenure at the Swoosh began in the early ’90s just as the brand started its aggressive expansion into global soccer. His early work for teams including Arsenal and the Italian national team helped define a visual language that still echoes through the game today: bold graphics, cultural relevance, and a willingness to disrupt tradition without disrespecting it.

Ramberg’s most recent project brought him back to Italy – specifically, to Venice, and three-way collaboration between himself, Venezia FC and Drake’s NOCTA, where he was tasked with designing the Venetian teams’s fourth kit. Reflecting on a career that spanned both Nike’s formative years in football and some of the sport’s most iconic designs, he finds that, for him, little has changed. The process always starts the same way: “You always look at the jersey almost like a blank canvas and try to balance the graphics in it,” he tells Hypebeast.

“Footballers are like superheroes. Their uniforms shouldn’t be boring, right?”

It’s a mindset that’s produced some of football’s most enduring visuals.

But Ramberg’s path into football design wasn’t conventional. A fine art major by training, he joined Nike during a period of few restrictions and an appetite for risk, when the brand’s football team was encouraged to experiment. He was afforded a creative freedom that gave rise to a now-mythologised era of kits, one defined by jacquard textures, shiny-dull contrasts and graphic storytelling – designs that today are revered as cultural artefacts by the sports most dedicated fans and collectors.

When asked what makes a kit stand the test of time, Ramberg’s response is unambiguous: “If you’re authentic to the club or the federation, if you’re telling an authentic story and not trying to be trendy, just trying to create a compelling design,” he explains, “and if it’s tasteful and it shows the players and fans that you understood their culture and identity, then it becomes timeless.”

It’s a philosophy that guided his work with Venezia. Drawing from the city’s visual language – the winged Lion of Saint Mark, architecture, flags and centuries of art history – Ramberg sought to reflect the club’s deep connection to place. “Everywhere you look there is this lion motif. It’s such a key part of the city,” he says. “I wanted to bring it in, in a cool way.”

And what of his namesake? “I always tell people I’m the OG because I’m older, right?!” he says with a laugh. “I haven’t met him yet, but hoping to in the future. My son’s a huge fan.”

Despite the rise of digital tools, Ramberg’s process remains rooted in handcraft. “I still start with sketches,” the designer tells us says. “I don’t go straight into working on the computer and I always encourage designers to do stuff by hand – paint, draw, whatever it takes to get your idea across, hack the tools and try different directions.”

Today, football design sits at the intersection of sport, fashion and culture – something Ramberg has watched evolve in cycles. “In the ’90s it was very graphic, very bold,” he says. “Now people are looking back at that era with a lot of nostalgia.”

An Arsenal FC fan, Ramberg’s designs for the north London team – whether by plan or coincidence – would become some of his most memorable. They include the north London team’s iconic Lightning Bolt jersey from the 1994/95 season, which he designed “to represent an arsenal in a more bold, dynamic way than a stationary cannon.” In 1995, Ramberg reimagined Italy’s national team kit, before doing the same for Nigeria in 1996. The latter was an unapologetically bold, bright green garment that arrived on the back of the nations’s victory in the Africa Cup of Nations and first-ever World Cup qualification at USA ‘94 – and, on retrospect, it helped to amplify the Super Eagles’ announcement that they had firmly landed on the international stage.

“I’ve worked in football since the ’90s and, 30 years later, people still remember the kits that I worked on. There’s a lot of love for that era because of the graphic nature of it. I think people want to see that again.”

As footballers increasingly become style icons and cultural tastemakers, their kits now live far beyond the game’s 90 minute matches. But even in the face of rapid change, both within the sport itself and the culture that surrounds it, Ramberg’s principles haven’t changed. He tells us that he “errs towards stuff that’s a little more bold and graphic and in your face because it’s a uniform.” For Ramberg, footballers “are like superheroes,” and, he says, “their uniforms shouldn’t be boring, right?”

Ramberg’s work and design philosophy continutes to resonate today – not because it chased fashion, but because it respected football first.

With the 2026 FIFA World Cup coming to American soil, the designer’s legacy comes full circle – a testament to an era when football kits became cultural statements, and a reminder that the best design, like the game itself, is timeless.