The past couple weeks have been chaotic as we’re building out our new office space here in Portland (which I’ll post about separately), in the middle of which I took off to PA to shoot some snowboarding at Seven Springs Resort. Forum Snowboards sponsored a “real street” inspired snowboard park, and I headed out to the mountains near Pittsburgh to shoot the grand opening for Yobeat. The resulting video can be viewed after the jump. That’s Austen Sweetin above.

Just took a road trip down to San Francisco to shoot another urban snowboard rail jam for Yobeat. It’s halloween weekend, and there’s no distinguishing between those who are dressed up, and those who just live here and are out for a walk. Check out the gallery I shot at the bottom of the post here on Yobeat.

Yesterday I went up to Seattle and shot the Sixth annual Downtown Throwdown, a snowboard rail jam in Occidental Square. Hundreds of bags of trucked in snow and some rail features brought out a huge crowd. At one point a lady asked me “is this one of those Occupy protests I’ve been seeing on the news?” Yes, yes it is. You can see the full gallery here on Yobeat.

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.

The annual Pipe to Pipe went down today up at Mt. Hood. There’s a snowboard portion at Timberline, followed by a skateboard contest at Windells Camp. I hit up the skate portion this evening, and shot a few photos, some of which should be in the Yobeat gallery tomorrow. I’ll ad that link when it’s up. Until then You can check out the story and full gallery here on Yobeat. There are two photos above: Rion Linderman, who unfortunately left his front teeth on the concrete in qualifiers (but won best trick for the day with a huge McTwist on the quarter) and Omar Hassan, who recently relocated from SoCal to Portland. Omar is boardsliding from the wedge in the background, around the bowl corner, to revert out. Smooth as glass.

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.

We went up to the 2011 Holy Oly at the Summit at Snoqualmie near Seattle on Saturday. Holy Oly is a fun, mellow snowboard contest, which features a huge quarterpipe, and jib/rail set up. The winner for the day (as judged by a panel of notable snow industry veterans) wins a pallet of Olympia beer, and gets his (or her) name etched into the “Holiest of the Holy” trophy. This was the 8th annual event, and past winners include Peter Line, Austin Hironaka, and Wille Yli Luoma. This year, Manuel Diaz gets to lug a bunch of beer back to Chile. I put together the above video for Yobeat. Yes, the soundtrack is sarcastic.You can also check out the story and Brooke’s photo gallery on Yobeat.

I also put together a “Show and Tell” video for Level Magazine, with some cool footage I had of Aaron Draplin that wasn’t used in the Yobeat video series from a few weeks back. In this one, Draplin shows some of the neat old packaging he’s collected from estate sales over the years. Some would consider it junk, but as Aaron points out it has a “Fuckin’ Rad value of millions and millions of dollars.” Check it out here.

This is part one of an interview we did with Graphic Designer Aaron Draplin. Draplin cut his teeth in snowboarding, working on Snowboarder Magazine, Snowboard Mag, and on identities for brands like Union Binding Co. and Coal. He’s since evolved into national design speaking gigs and has done work for the Obama administration. Part Two next week.

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.