How Plastisol Ink Reads on a Garment, Physically Run a thumb across the graphic on a decades-old skate or surf tee and the ink itself will often answer half the dating question before the tag does. That's because plastisol — the ink that dominated garment screen printing through the skate boom years and still dominates …

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 …

By the mid-1980s, skateboarding had outgrown its identity as a surf substitute. Concrete parks, street spots, and backyard ramps demanded their own visual language — and the companies that understood this first built empires. The deck itself became the medium. Graphics were not decoration; they were argument, …