The Screaming Hand: Jim Phillips's Santa Cruz Icon

Oct 6, 2026 / Oct 7, 2026 · 6 min read · Jim Phillips Santa Cruz Skateboards Screaming Hand ·

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A Sketch That Started as a Private Joke, Not a Logo

Jim Phillips drew the clenched hand for years before he gave it a mouth, and long before any company asked him for a logo. By his own account, the gesture traced back to high school, when he filled his book covers and notepads with surf cartoons: a big wave, a goofy surfer, circling shark fins, and a clenched hand sticking out of the water "like a drowning guy." In the account on Santa Cruz Skateboards' Screaming Hand page, he traces it to seeing a drowned man at the beach, "the first dead person I ever saw," after which he kept drawing the clenched hand on his book covers and notepads.

The private sketch became a commercial graphic only when NHS, Inc., the Santa Cruz, California skateboard distribution company founded in 1973 by Richard Novak, Doug Haut and Jay Shuirman, was putting together a new wheel line and asked Phillips for a logo. Sitting at his drawing table, Phillips clenched his own left hand and started sketching, thinking about how much emotion a hand gesture alone could carry. Then came the mouth on the palm, and then the scream. "I got pretty worked up and knew my drawing would make a cool logo," he says on the same page, "though it took some time to talk the manager into it." The first uses were stickers and T-shirts; SurferToday's profile adds that the Hand was first used to promote Santa Cruz's Speed Wheels.

From a Surf Magazine Contest to a Full-Time Art Director's Desk

Phillips's path to that drawing table didn't begin at NHS. Born in San Jose, California, in 1944, he grew up as an Army kid moving between postings until he was six, and has said his earliest creative habit was copying comic-strip characters straight out of the newspaper. His first professional break came in the spring of 1962, when his pen-and-ink drawing of a woodie won a surf-car cartoon contest run by Surfer Quarterly, the magazine founded by John Severson. Paid work on surfboards followed before NHS brought him on as a staff artist. The connection was personal as well as professional: Phillips told SurferToday that he had known Richard Novak, the Santa Cruz founder, since high school, through surfing. His first job for the company, he recalled, came "when they developed the Road Rider urethane wheels around 1975. They wanted a t-shirt, a sticker, and a logo for that, and that kicked it off." He has also been candid about the trade itself: "I tell people it's the best job ever, but it's the worst."

Before the Hand, Phillips had already drawn much of the brand's look. He designed the angular Santa Cruz lettering logo in 1976, the OJ Wheels logo in 1977, Independent Truck Co.'s Maltese-cross logo in 1979, and the Rob Roskopp skateboard graphic series in 1984. He opened his own Phillips Studios in 1988, and across his career also produced more than 100 rock-concert posters for acts including The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, and The Surfaris.

A Note on the Date

Santa Cruz Skateboards, SurferToday and Visit Santa Cruz County all date the Screaming Hand to 1985, and the brand's 30th-anniversary show ran in 2015 and 2016. One retailer, the Made in Santa Cruz shop's Jim Phillips page, says 1973, the year NHS was founded and its first Santa Cruz boards were made. The brand's own date is 1985. The separate red-dot "Santa Cruz" lettering logo, according to Wikipedia's Santa Cruz Skateboards article, is an earlier Phillips design from 1978.

How a Sticker Became Skateboarding's Most Reused Image

The Hand went far beyond its first job of selling wheels. Santa Cruz calls it "probably the most recognizable graphic in skateboarding history." SurferToday describes it as "cool, irreverent, vivid, gnarly, impactful" and notes that it needs no lettering or background to be read. Visit Santa Cruz County, writing about the anniversary exhibit, compared it to Edvard Munch's The Scream "for the skateboarding community."

Thirty Years, Then Forty: Exhibitions and a Design Dispute

For the Hand's 30th anniversary in 2015 and 2016, NHS assembled more than 200 international artists to reimagine the graphic across paintings, illustrations, and sculpture, in a touring exhibition that visited more than 25 cities before returning to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) for a run through March 26, 2017. That show paired Phillips's original work with pieces by his son, Jimbo Phillips, and his then-14-year-old grandson, alongside outside artists such as Jeff Meadows, Tosh Woods, and graffiti artist Bigfoot One — contributions that ranged from a functioning lightbox depicting an x-ray version of the Hand to a wearable, oversized costume interpretation.

Its fame also drew copies. In February 2013, designer Jeremy Scott showed clothing and accessories at New York Fashion Week that skate artists and fans said closely resembled Phillips family designs, prompting an outcry from Santa Cruz artists and skaters. NHS's Denike called it "clear and obvious infringement by Mr. Scott," according to Wikipedia's account, which also records that the matter was settled that September with Scott admitting error and the items destroyed.

For the Hand's 40th year, Santa Cruz's Australian site reported that it had invited Melbourne street artist Phibs to paint his own version of the graphic at Riverslide Skate Park. Phibs, whose work covers walls across Melbourne neighborhoods like Fitzroy and Prahran, kept Phillips's basic composition intact while working in what he called his own "curly pattern work," wings, and organic detailing drawn from 1980s graffiti writers, the painter Brett Whiteley and wayang kulit, the shadow-puppet art of family friends from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. "I was interested in skating, but I never got into it," he told the site. "I was more drawn to the graffiti. But definitely all those graphics—they got my attention."

Why the Image Still Sells, and Who's Still Drawing It

Santa Cruz still sells the graphic across decks, completes, apparel, and accessories ranging from picture frames and tiki mugs to plushies and string lights, and Phillips's own licensed shop sells a dedicated book, The Art of Jim Phillips: Surf, Skate & Rock Art, alongside prints and stickers of his wider body of work. Prices there ran from a $3.95 decal to $42.95 for the book.

The line of authorship has stayed in the family, too. Wikipedia notes that Jimbo Phillips was designing artwork for Santa Cruz as of 2013, and Jim Phillips told SurferToday that his son and his grandson, Colby, "incorporate that kind of art into everything they do." He expects the Hand to last for the same reason: "I think the Screaming Hand will have a long life because there are so many artists that have done it and want to do it." Forty years after a high-school doodle became a wheel logo, the record bears him out, from the 200-artist anniversary show to a Melbourne skate-park wall.