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.

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.

The second part of the video interview I did with design guru Aaron Draplin is up on Yobeat. This one talks a lot about his work ethic… scrapping together a lot of “little stuff” versus working with the big guys. He also touches on early graphic influences including legendary skate artists like Jim Phillips. If you get the chance to see one of his design lectures around the country, do it.

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.

Our friends over at Woodward Camp just launched a new educational program — a boarding school of sorts — combining BMX, Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Music, and various art programs with traditional college-prep education. Above is the mark we designed for program a couple months back. A W/U combination with an ever so subtle nod to a spine ramp. You can read more about the program here.

I miss the era when magazines pushed the limits. In general, that time is gone. A newsstand (albeit a very thin newsstand) full of grid driven formulaic publications. No fluidity. No experimentation. All based on formulas. Maybe it’s a bit of nostalgia, but the print publications of today just don’t push the boundaries on the visual and editorial concept end.

There are magazine formulas. Countless meetings on sales driving cover-lines, theories about placing numbers on the cover to draw female buyers, logo placement for newsstand position. The result is a see of the same. Gone are the days of Raygun, Bikini, Speak, The Face, Plazm, Emigre, and others.

There are some great, clean designs on the newstand. Magazines doing nice things. But there is no wonder going into the next spread. The grid throughout is forced, and typography is predictable. We need a new breed to push the limits. I’m not hoping for another grunge era, or another David Carson. I’m hoping for something that creates an edge. There are still a (very small) handful that fill that void.

One of my current favorites that continues to draw me in is Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story. I hesitate to call Zoetrope a magazine as it breaks the mold and contrasts the formulas. This publication of short stories features up-and-coming writers as well as established legends like Coppola, Woody Allen, David Foster Wallace, along Anthony Bourdain. Each issue features a guest designers —and that doesn’t always mean a graphic designer — like Chip Kidd, Lou Reed, Julian Schnabel, Mike Mills, Wim Wenders, David Bowie, Tom Waits, Gus Van Sant. Filmmakers, musicians, artists, designers, the publication has a different visual voice with each issue.

In a stand full of formulas… full of grid driven Helvetica headlines, Zoetrope: All-story is a great departure into a more experimental realm of publication design. You can subscribe online for $24 or pick them up at better news stands and bookstores. I came across Zoetrope for the first time a couple years back, and since then I’ve found each issue to be a refreshing departure from the norm. If you’re looking for a magazine the follows the rules of publication design to a T, you won’t enjoy this, but if you’re looking for something outside the box, pick it up now.

You can check out my previous post on magazines of a another era here.

You can see some of the magazines I’ve designed in the past here.

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.

In early 1996, while I was in design school in Boston, I took a Graphic Design internship at a magazine called Stuff. This wasn’t the macho/meathead Stuff that arose later, this was a Boston-based culture/fashion/music/literary monthly that got distributed (for free) at hip Northeast locations, including boutiques, galleries, record stores, book stores, etc. It was an over-sized, predominantly black and white magazine, printed on paper that was a couple steps above newsprint.

A few months later my internship was up, and they hired me as a freelance designer. A few months after that the art director left. As the only one involved who knew the production process, and nuts and bolts of the magazine, I ended up filling the position temporarily… which came to mean about two years. I had some sense of what I was doing. Some.

My time at Stuff was the tail end of when magazines were still made the “old way.” These days, everything is done on a computer, and layouts barely see paper until it hits a press plate. Printers don’t even have a real pre-press (film to plate) phase anymore. Everything is direct to plate. For this reason, it’s gotten a LOT cheaper to make a magazine.

So there I was, waxing layouts to boards, shooting things with a Stat camera to halftone them, and repeatedly stabbing myself with X-acto knives (not on purpose). But, somehow, I was making a magazine. The old fashioned way. As time went on I started pushing things farther and farther with typography, bringing things as far as the publisher and the parent company would let me. I had a lot of leeway. This was a time when Neville Brody, David Carson, Art Chantry, Martin Venezky, P. Scott Makela and others were making some really progressive typographic magazines. The Face, Beach Culture, Blue, Speak, Raygun, Bikini, Sweater, etc. These were magazines that where pushing visual interpretation as far as they could, offending a lot of design purist, and making a lot of others happy.

Stuff went all over the board as I had pretty much open reign to fuck things up. Some of it, looking back is really terrible, but most of the stuff I hate is the stuff that wasn’t experimental. Some of it is still some of my favorite work that I’ve done. I was blowing things up on the copier, running things through the fax machine, even taking other people’s trash from the Stat camera room and reusing it. I started learning photography at Stuff as well, so really, that magazine was my education. There is no better way to learn than doing something. While I was going to school during that time, the real stuff I was learning was at the magazine. In school you learn the rules. At Stuff I could break the rules. Sometimes people got in arguments over it.

In the middle of 1998 they hired a full-time art director. I continued to design the poetry page (Re:Verse) for a few months, but I otherwise focused more on school, and the magazine I was starting with Brian Tunney, Nine-Ninety. Later that year the publisher who gave me all the opportunities along the way was fired, and ultimately the magazine was rolled into a nightlife publication called Stuff@Night. This is a collection of work from “The Stuff Years.” Still some of my favorite work, over ten years later. Thanks to Robert Birnbaum and the rest of the crew for some good times.

In design mode the last few weeks, working on 5 catalogs for Woodward Camp (East and West, Gymnastics and Action Sports). Also designed the above t-shirt for snowboard site YoBeat, which is available now in gray and black over on their store.