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 …

A Marina del Rey Prodigy Turned Pro at Fourteen A single deck shape, patented in 1985, is still marketed today by retailers as "the shape made famous by Christian Hosoi." That kind of staying power says something about how vert skating's most flamboyant star built his reputation during the 1980s boom — not only through …

Turning Down the Big Companies: 1977 At nineteen, Tony Alva had already done enough to skate for whichever company he wanted. Instead, in 1977, he walked away from the sport's established brands and started his own. Alva Skates became, in the words of the Los Angeles Times' 2007 profile of Alva, the vehicle that made …

The Anaheim Storefront That Became Vans On opening day at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim, the shoe boxes were stocked and color-coded — blue for men, orange for boys, red for kids, green for women — but the cash register held nothing at all. The owners had forgotten to put money in it. When customers arrived, they picked …

Thrasher's Founding and the Media Infrastructure It Built By 1981, skateboarding in America had no dedicated publication built by skaters, for skaters, at the volume the culture actually operated at — and that gap is what Thrasher was built to fill. The magazine launched that year, published out of San Francisco by …

A Disembodied Hand That Defined a Decade A disembodied hand — five fingers splayed wide, a mouth opened mid-scream across the palm — arrived in skateboarding in 1985 and has never really left. Jim Phillips drew that image for Santa Cruz Skateboards, and the Screaming Hand became one of the most reproduced graphics in …

The Rider Was the Product In the 1980s skate industry, the deck under a kid's feet was rarely the thing being sold first. The thing being sold was a person — a pro skater whose name was on the board, whose graphic was the graphic, and whose style in a magazine sequence or a video part told the buyer what the brand …

A Format Nobody Expected to Sell When Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show in 1984, the company expected to sell about 300 copies on VHS. It sold 30,000. That gap — two orders of magnitude between the forecast and the result — is the whole story of how skate video became the dominant marketing medium of …

The Boom Was Built on a Bust The popular image of 1980s skateboarding — vert ramps, backyard halfpipes, street skaters grinding curbs in the suburbs — looks like a culture that chose the margins on purpose. In a sense it did, but the choice was forced. The reason skating moved out of purpose-built commercial parks and …

In 1986, on a plaza of granite ledges and brick gaps in front of the Embarcadero in San Francisco, Mark Gonzales ollied across a gap that no contest had a category for. There was no judging panel, no coping, no transition — just a flat run-up, a tap of the tail, and a jump cleared over a stretch of pavement that office …