Twenty years ago you could go into a shoe store and order custom Vans skate shoes, on which you could specify a handful of colors on various panels on the shoes. In a couple weeks you’d have your own, custom canvas shoe. Pretty neat, but I never did it. Probably mostly for the inconvenience of dealing with an old man at a shoe store, and the confusion that would result.

These days, a number of companies including Vans offer online shoe customization engines which show you a detailed view as you go. Popularized by the surge in “shoe culture” over the last few years, Nike’s ID system has taken off, allowing shoe-heads to customize and personalize a number of different models.

Nike 6.0 (Nike’s youth-oriented action sports program) sponsors the AST Dew Tour this year, and at the Portland stop my friend Sierra from Nike gave me the opportunity to try out the system. Above is the result (photographed in their natural environment of course).

The personalization thing is a little wacky for my taste, but otherwise they turned out as expected. Customers are given a fair number of material and color selections which can be applied to specific panels based on the model of the shoe. It’s not full customization, but that would be logistically impossible from a manufacturing standpoint.

If $130 worth of Nike isn’t up your alley, skateboard brands Vans and Etnies both have online customization engines, as do a few others.

A fun game I’m enjoying is trying to make the ugliest possible colorways of various models, as seen below with the 6.0 Air Mogan. You can get some pretty wild results. Feel free to recreate this one for yourself.