SKATE RESEARCH

I've decided that 'PLAY NICE' and my branding is going to be influenced by the skating sub-culture and mainly aimed at individuals interested in skating and other extreme sports. So here's a post from PPP again which was research into skate boards

Skate brands

I've decided just to look a one or two more skate brands and just have a closer look at their products and what they sell, just to give myself a little more of a idea of how I can go about doing this. I've chosen a few brands to have a quick look at first.

Toy machine was established in 1993 by Ed Templeton and professional skateboarder and artist. They have produced many skate videos and had a number of pro skaters use their boards but i'm mainly here to focus on the artwork they use on skateboard and merch as opposed to the history of their brand as I will be doing with the other brands i've chosen to look at

There merch as far as t-shirts and hoodies seem to be heavily branded with their little demon logo which makes, sense it does look really cool and it's a well recognised mascot of the brands. a lot of the slake board decks look highly digital and I really don't like some of them, not to my taste as it were. But I'm sure if my work on decks it wouldn't be to someones taste either. The most interesting thing I found was how many socks they do, and really cool socks for $10. I never really thought about socks but it seems to be an in thing

 Jamie Thomas another professional skateboarder started the ZERO Skateboarding brand and distributed at first with Black Box Distribution but then went onto use Dwindle Distribution company in late June, 2014.

Again the boards seem very graphic, very digital not quite as low-fi as the work I produce but it should be because I think it'd look really cool. Saying that I did produce a graphic intense colour mock up earlier on my blog so my practice could still fit around it. Like toy machine the main bulk of their wearables focus mainly of the SKULL ZERO logo and SOCKS, MORE SOCKS. Socks appear to be a think I need to get on.

Mark Gonzales also known as Gonz started Krooked and is known as been a top pioneer of modern skateboarding, like the two I've looked at prior make is an artist as well as a professional skateboarder.

Krooked seems a little different to the two previous brands I've looked at, For one a lot of the decks are made by guest artists which is a good thing for guys like me to get in on and as an added icing on the cake the tone of voice seems a lot more low brow and more in line with my kind of work. I can't see any socks but they make a lot of stickers and other accessories which i'm interested in getting involved in.