this is work?

Quickie GIF for some some email blast A/B testing… It can be awfully hard to pick just one static hero image when there's such a large variety of options in a promo like this—I dig the way this obnoxious GIF shows 'em all.

[ Photography provided by Elm ]

I got stuck helped out with the Photoshop work on this project, but it's all good—it's still as close as I've ever come to a Folio award!

(I've worked on dozens of media kits over the years, but this is the first one I also researched, wrote, and built from the ground up—so even though it was a lot more work, this was by far the easiest one;)

In my reality, creative direction is often be more about spreadsheets, analytics, and whiteboards before you ever start on the visual design. And though the question of how best to display items in a webstore can get unbelievably complex, I think few users outside of Tumblr would suffer Homer Simpson's web page.

"When something breaks, it has to be fixed. You can try to take a short cut and fix it the wrong way, or you can take the opportunity to build it better. It’s quite simple. If you keep burning out stock clutches, don’t simply replace it, upgrade it."

My favorite part about this blurry photo is the fact that it was taken in August of '08—months before the election. Epps has always been a step ahead.

Mark Gonzales used to hang out at the Thrasher offices quite a bit, and I was lucky enough to get to work closely with him when he was trying to come up for a name for his skateboard company. He really wanted to call it STANCE, but Transworld had just put out a mag called that at the time, so he started doodling new ideas and quickly latched onto "crooked", eventually adding another K at the front before flipping the second K backwards. I digitized these drawings and helped him create his first KROOKED logo by flipping the K from the handritten version he liked best, before fattening it up and vectorizing it in Illustrator for posterity...

Cover design by The Real Thrasher Dan

Of the three shirt designs he's done for the mag, this is by far my favorite. He originally designed this for our 30th anniversary last year—check the three "x"s in the top row...

Camputee Press here in SF just saved me $1000 on a last-minute 1000 t-shirt order—hit them up for some quality work at a great price.

Move a desk,  find a priceless relic. Unconfirmed if this Thrasher submission from back in 1994 is really by "that" T. Biskup but that would be really cool if it was...

I'm really glad we did a press check on this one, as the press matched the PMS # we asked for perfectly but on the black T it just looked "too yellow" still.... Being able to change the color seconds before printing hundreds of Ts is one of the biggest benefits to printing locally, and I can't say enough good about the good people at Supreme Ink here in SF.

Thrasher x American Apparel tanks in the works for summer 2012!

Quit bitching, start building.

Preview the Pushead-curated issue here.