Velvet Skateboards

I have been the lead graphic designer for Velvet Skateboards since its inception, drafting up logos and deck graphics and sticker and t-shirt designs. It's always been a dream of mine to be able to design skate graphics, and getting full creative control over my designs is so fucking awesome, and getting to lean into experimentation and just see what works has been and will continue to be an utmost pleasure. This is not every single graphic I've ever done for Velvet, but these are some of my favorites and some I'm the most proud of!

The following are styled like postcards, featuring some photos that you can get a better look at in my photography page

And a litte postcard sized one for a run we never ended up printing. Might still though!

For these next ones I took some pictures of textures I found at work and then did my thing on them, ending up with these super sweet psychedelic patterns and colors that meld really well together!

These are a collection of color variants uopn the same basic design, such as a different colored background. In the interest of saving storage space, I won't host every single color variant here, but instead my favorites out of the batches

Typically I try to make each deck size a different graphic, but with these I liked them so much that they would be the same across the range of sizes of decks. Pretty fucking stoked on these!

Skating and music go hand in hand, and so I decided to do a series that paid homage to some of my musical tastes.

This is a ska deck, complete with a skateboarding rendition of the infamous Beat Girl, an icon associated with the 2nd Wave ska band The English Beat. Ska as a genre gets a lot of heat, and its association with skateboarding via the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtracks are not to be understated, but this era of the genre is important in its own right. Most of the ska bands to come out of this time were multi-racial, a direct expression of solidarity between the working classes of England and the Jamaican immigrants who lived and worked side by side with them. The infamous checkerboard pattern is a representation of that solidarity, a mix of black and white, together making music and looking out for each other. With political lyrics reflecting the socio-economic struggles of the bands, and incredible musicianship drawing influence from reggae, jazz, punk, calypso, and Caribbean mento, the 2nd wave of ska is worth revisiting, and its influence remains indelible. You can check out my obsession with that genre here

This logo style pays homage to JFA, aka Jodie Foster’s Army. With a name that references the attempted assassination of Reagan in the 80’s, these dudes played blisteringly fast skate punk, and started making their own boards at the same time, under the same name. They were incredibly crucial to the skatepunk scene in the southwest in the 80's and early 90's, with the lead singer Brian Bannon going on to write for Thrasher between 1990 and 1997. My friend Cora and I acutally got a chance to meet Brian at a skatepark in California in the summer of 2021. He was still skating one of his JFA boards, and Cora was riding the Velvet JFA homage. We got to show him the graphic on an 8.5 shaped deck, and Brian genuinely seemed stoked about it! We talked about old school skateboarding, making boards, and punk rock, and it was honestly such a cool fucking moment. You can check out JFA's stuff here and get some more punky goodness here

This one pays respect to Olivia Records with a rework of their logo. Olivia Records was a collective of lesbians and women-loving-women in the 70’s. They put out a whole bunch of fantastic lesbian music, and notably employed a trans woman by the name of Sandy Stone as a producer and recording engineer for a number of years. As far as a small homosexual label putting out soul and folk music goes, they found incredible success, going so far as to book a label lineup for two sold out nights at Carnagie Hall, and selling over a million records during the label's lifetime. I found out about them by grabbing The Ways A Woman Can Be by Teresa Trull on a whim, putting on the album without giving it a test listen, and immediately falling in love. You can find out more about Olivia Records here

I try and do one sticker design a year so we can see where we've been and when we've been there. It's always fun getting to go around and notice a sticker from like two years ago, and suddenly get hit with the memories of a specific spot.

Here's some miscellaneous stuff, logos, shirt graphics, and other such things!

you can really see the inspo from Crass, Conflict, and Aus-Rotten in the one on the right

Velvet Skateboards is a collective of queer skaters that seek to make skating accessible and not driven by all of profit seeking bastards that wanna make the next street league or be the next nyjah huston. If you want to sumbit a design for a Velvet, hit me up about it at btchpssmbtch@gmail.com. We don't sell our decks for a profit so as to keep them as cheap as possible without sacrificing quality, so if that sounds like something you want to be a part of, hell yeah! You can check out more about Velvet here. Now go out and fuckin skate!!