Here’s the look book we started sending out last week to retailers for the fall 2011 / winter 2012 Yobeat line. This stuff should be available in select snowboard related shops around the country in the coming month or so, and it’s all available now on the Yobeat online store. In addition to the above Issue flipbook, it’s also downloadable as PDF here. All this stuff gets designed and printed in house. 25 different styles plus colorways… I didn’t realize it was that much stuff until we put it all together.

Since summer is in full swing, and two of the major snowboard summer camps are on Mt. Hood, right outside Portland (there is snow there year round), we wanted to do a special Yobeat shirt for the summer that had a kitchy tourist sort of feel… A souvenir of sorts for some of the campers and staff up there to take home. We ended up with a nice clean vector illustration of Mt. Hood’s silhouette, with a two-color print.

Rather than just design them and hand off a disk to someone else, I printed a ton of them myself right here on our press. One of the things I like about design and photography is the hands on part… the process of making shit. That hands on process is easy to lose when you pass off a computer file to a printer. I try to get as much hand done process in as I can, when I can, which is part of the reason I like screen printing. Now that we have a set-up in house, I get to do more experimenting, and keep myself sane and off the computer at times.

These are sort of a “locals only edition.” We’re not selling them in our online store. We gave away one free to each of the snowboard campers at the first week of camp at Windell’s (it was “YoBeat Week” at camp) and they’ll be for sale exclusively through Exit Real World’s Government Camp location throughout the summer. I just shipped up a batch yesterday for those guys so keep your eyes peeled in their shop if you want to get your hands on one. After the jump I’ve posted a few detail shots, and some images I poached from the Yobeat Facebook Page of kids wearing them around snowboard camp last week. Turned out to be a great promo, and kids like free stuff.

I’ve been doing design work for Woodward Camp since 2006-ish. I do the catalogs every year, as well as a lot of the advertising, collateral, shirts, etc. They’re growing constantly, even expanding internationally, and there’s always something new going on, so it’s fun stuff. We work with a number of different brands in our office, both big and small, but Woodward is one of the most consistent. This year’s print and web look started with a sheet of steel in my garage, a few stencils, and some muriatic acid. The resulting rusty steel textures got used as subtle elements in the catalogs this year, but they take on more of a roll in the ads. Essentially, I quick-rusted the area around the stencil with the acid and water, then shot photos of the result to use in the designs. The textures got worked in with some provided action photography (I shot the BMX ad of Morgan Wade) and we were off and running. We also worked QR codes into the print campaign this year, to direct readers to the various Woodward web portals by simply scanning them with their smart phone. See the ads after the jump.

Woodward did a larger online marketing push this year than in previous years. We used the tagline “Come Ride With Us” and “Come Skate With Us” throughout the online campaign. Here’s a small sampling of those ads, which are currently running in a number of sizes and iterations.

Before the SIA Tradeshow (the big snow industry show) in Denver, we threw around some ideas in the office in regards to handouts for Yobeat advertisers, pro riders, and overall cool people. Something to give away in meetings or run-ins that wasn’t just a business card that they threw in their bag and forgot about. We wanted to do something that made an impression quickly and that people would actually look at. We also wanted to communicate visually that Yobeat is more than a snowboard web site, we also help brands create marketing strategies. We thought about basic t-shirts and hats, but everyone does that, and again, they just get tossed in a SWAG bag with other tradeshow goodies, often to be forgotten about.

Yobeat’s traffic has grown tremendously in the last year, so we had to show that we were just as “Pro” as the corporate guys, but still had that DIY mentallity that sports like snowboarding are born from. In other words, Pro, without being too Pro. Since we’ve been doing all of our new apparel in-house, a t-shirt was a good way to promote that, but we didn’t want to be cliché about it. So we decided upon a packaging option we could create in-house that would contain a limited edition t-shirt (we did 60 shirts using our new script design, in a limited gold flake ink just for the show), as well as a limited edition die-cut sticker, a screen printed Yobeat sticker, and of course, our business cards. The shirts and header cards for the packaging were all screen printed in house. Woven tags were sewn onto the shirt for a custom, finished feel, and everything got put together and shipped off to Denver. We got a lot of great response. The general reaction seemed to be “Holy shit, you guys got Pro.” A few brands quickly asked us about the creative direction side of what we do, so it worked well. We gave away all 60 pieces pretty quickly, and at this point I don’t even have one for myself.

The draw to design for me is the actually creation. I’d much rather create something on a small budget entirely in-house if we have the opportunity. This was the perfect opportunity to do that. Had we outsourced these, it would have been too costly, but in-house they were about $3 each. Check out some more details after the jump. The white with gold was a tradeshow only edition, but we may be releasing a gold ink black shirt version in the future (without the fancy kit, though).

At some point last year I started helping design more apparel for the snowboard site YoBeat, trying to take things beyond its basic logo t’s. At some point in the process we got the bug to take things one step further, and make more of an apparel line, sell it on the site, and hopefully get it into some shops. In recent years, part of brand marketing has become creating content around a brand, hopefully getting that content played as editorial content. It’s advertorial. Or advertising disguised as editorial. We went the opposite direction, and started creating a brand out of an existing editorial voice and content stream. There was a built in audience, so why not. So far it’s worked out well. A number of shops around the country have already signed on to carry the goods, and we’ve been selling the stuff through Yobeat’s online store. The products market the site, the site markets the products. One can go without the other, and the gear can stand on its own. We set up an in-house screen printing shop so we could streamline producing samples, and also keep things within the realm of the DIY approach YoBeat has taken throughout the years. So far so good.

Above are a couple of the new shirts in the line, to which we’ve added sewn on woven tags to the lower left front. The new “Snowboarding is Super Fun” shirt is a play on the ironic hipster type shirts you see at streetwear shops. The only YoBeat branding being the small woven tag. Hipsters rejoice. It’s even got swashes on the type. After the jump you’ll find some more details, larger views, and some new embroidered patches we’ve created as well. This stuff is a nice break from doing commercial work for clients. On that stuff there’s always compromise. With this stuff we get to do what we like, and even produce most of it in-house, keeping it fun and hands-on. The new shirts should be on the online store later this week, and you can also find some other designs over there are up in the Yobeat store now. This is just the beginning of the new stuff for 2011.

To find YoBeat apparel at a shop near you, click here or click here to order online.

Just got the last of these back from the printer. This is much of September and October around the studio. This is the fifth year in a row we’ve produced the catalogs for Woodward Camp, the largest Action Sports, Gymnastics and Cheer summer camps/training facilities in the world. This year it was five catalogs in total (three for Woodward in PA, two for Woodward West). We’re designing for a broad, young audience on these — about 7-17 years of age. It’s a relatively quick turnaround for the scope of the project (five forty-page catalogs in two months), but the quick pace and deadlines keep things fun. You can check out a few details after the jump.

In Honor of Festivus, a holiday dedicated to and created by the prophet Frank Costanza, a donation has been made in your name to the Human Fund.

Click to see larger. It’s a Festivus Miracle!

Mt. Baldy. If you’re a skateboarder, BMXer, even a rollerblader you’re familiar with the Mt. Baldy fullpipe. The drainage tube, located in the hills of Southern California, behind barbed wire fences and across a menacing chasm, has been shredded by several generations. I grew up looking at pictures of Salba and Blyther carving the pipe, so when I moved to California in 1999 it was one of the first places I went.

To this day, Baldy continues to be a spot that just about every serious skater or BMXer has on their hit list. It’s been in every magazine and countless videos. The graffiti is ever-changing, but the pipe remains the same after all these years.

I found this image I shot back in 2000 while digging through some photos and thought I’d make some shirts out of it. Hafltone images can be tricky, especially on dark shirts, but my friends Jamie and Jenn at Ink Brigade (you old school BMXers will know Jamie McParland’s name) said they could get it done. And they did. Turned out better than I thought they would.

I planned to just use these merely as holiday studio mailers to some industry types and friends. After all, skaters and BMXers alike can appreciate this one. Baldy is an icon. I posted a picture on Twitter and a lot of people expressed interest in them, so I’m making a limited number available for purchase. YoBeat has done me a favor and put them on its web store, and you can buy them there if you like $15. Printed on a nice, soft, ringspun t-shirt. They are a small style cut, so you may want to go up a size, especially if you’re of a portly stature. No logos or brand name bullshit on this one. Just a picture of god damn icon.

Anyway, if you would like, here you have them. Baldy. Concrete to Cotton. Icon. Get it.

My studio site (souneymedia.com) has been horribly outdated for the last couple years. Old work, old functionality etc. I think the last time I rebuilt it was 2005. I added a bit of work since, but otherwise, it was dated. I got a BETA invitation to try out the Cargo Collective CMS platform recently, and used this as an experiment to see how the platform worked. So I spent the last few weeks digging through work, shooting images of it, and getting things together. I’ll be adding more stuff as time goes on — Cargo makes it really easy to do so. But for now there’s a lot of old and new stuff up there to look at. You can click the commercial portfolio link on the right to get there, or just click here.

My regular updates will continue to be on this site, and the commercial stuff will continue to live over there.

How about a free screen wallpaper of Ben Hucke for your computer or iPhone? I waited two years for someone to handplant this damn T-Rex face on a BMX bike. T-Rex face? Yes, T-Rex face. There’s one at the Tigard, Oregon skatepark, complete with metal teeth. Since the built the park two years ago, it’s been handplanted on skateboards, and fastplanted on bikes. I brought a few people there that had vert handplants dialed to check it out, thinking they might be into handplanting it for a photo, but it hadn’t panned out. I think I almost got Kagy to try it, but the set up didn’t really work for the way he does them.

When Ben called me to shoot at Tigard a couple months back I didn’t see this one coming at all. He wasn’t sure he could do it as he’d never even tried it, but he got it done several times over, and now fires them out at will. At the time we’d planned to use this for a two page spread Haro ad. Haro hit me up and said they wanted to use it, so I sent it down and held off posting it. In the meantime, Ben and Haro parted ways. At first they said they were still going to run it, but then we Ben hit them up last week, they told him they weren’t.

The long and short of it is, it’s a bummer that it’s been sat on for two or three months. In this day and age, that’s an eternity. So instead of holding onto it even longer, I talked to Ben and Shad from Goods BMX, about making it a free downloadable Goods Wallpaper. Ben rides for Goods, Goods is awesome. So why not. So here it is in all its T-Rex face glory. There’s even an iPhone size for nerds like me.

Download 1680×1050 Screen Size

Download 1920 x 1080 Screen Size

Download 1280 x 960 Screen Size

Download iPhone Size