The Aby Lee Hnetinka Favourite skate logos?

As anyone who hasn’t been living under a mini-ramp for the past year will know, “Thrasher” hoodies and T-shirts have been having something of a fashion moment. Much, it has to be said, to the dismay of a great many skaters – even the San Francisco skate magazine’s legendary editor-in-chief Jake Phelps weighed in, clarifying that they “don’t send boxes to Justin Bieber or Rihanna or those f***ing clowns”.

I’m not entirely sure why Thrasher’s iconic logo percolated from the margins of culture, where skating lives, into the mainstream some time around 2016. After all, it’s been in existence since 1981, and the font, Banco, was designed back in the Fifties by a Frenchman, Roger Excoffon. The first Thrasher jumper I ever owned I bought off my friend Jasper in 1995 for £5 after he’d got hot rock burns in the sleeves and left it in a bush down the side of his house for a year. It was far and away my favourite teenage item of clothing, until I left it in a bush somewhere around 1998. (Sorry, I digress, but I feel the need to add this in as I’ve felt the Insta-wrath of some skaters who seem to think that I can’t possibly work for a style magazine and be an actual, real-life skater. I might be rubbish and look like I should be playing golf instead, but I put in the hours and have the scarred knees and lack of mobility in my right hand to show for it.)

A colleague, who writes about the ebb and flow of fashion and at any time looks as if he could have stepped out of the next season’s collections, tells me it’s simply because Thrasher is a damn cool word and the logo looks good. “Say it,” he said. “See, even sounds cool.” You could call it visual onomatopoeia but that would probably get you a punch at your local skatepark. True as this might be, it doesn’t explain why Thrasher above all others has caught the mainstream imagination, when skating is strangely blessed with a plethora of iconic and enduring logos that stand the test of time and sound damn cool – any of which could have blown up. The irony is that most skate brands have minimal money (or none) to invest in marketing and some even go out of their way to shun mainstream media – yet some of skate logos and graphics are strokes of genius that are instantly recognizable and stand head and shoulders above high street and high-end clothing brands that attempt to ape the aesthetic.

There are tens, maybe hundreds of other skate brands around the world and they’re all rad, but these, in my arbitrary opinion, are the top seven skate logos ever conceived.

Independent Trucks

Trucks are the part of a skateboard set-up that anyone who has never skated simply doesn’t understand – the metal things that hang off the board and connect to the wheels. “What do you mean it’s not the board but it’s not the wheels either?” Thus, Independent will always have kudos for being ever-uninterpretable by the masses, but it’s on my list because of its Alisee Cross logo. It’s so simple and in its almost quasi-militaristic way (it’s not the Iron Cross, however) is the perfect representation of a hard-core hardware brand whose main product pleases skaters the world over with that grinding sound.

Santa Cruz Screaming Hand

Created by Jim Phillips in 1985 for the archetypal Cali skate brand’s Speed Wheels line, the screaming hand was actually inspired in part by a drowned man the artist saw at a beach when he was younger. As art director at Santa Cruz in the Seventies and Eighties, Phillips penned myriad iconic deck designs for the like of Steve Olson, Rob Roskopp and Jason Jesse, but it’s the eerie blue screaming hand that stands out and looks as rad today as it did 30 years ago.

Anti-Hero 

A proper skaters' skate brand with a quite beautiful logo drawn by the artist Todd Francis and a name that sets out it stall. I love this logo but, and here’s the truth, I sort of don’t have the guts to ride an Anti-Hero board because I don’t feel I can do it justice – maybe I’ll spend the summer learning to skate pools and get myself hooked up. Or smashed up.

Zero 

Not its skull-drawn-in-blood logo but rather its original, pared-down four capital letters across the chest: ZERO. About as visually and linguistically stark as a logo can get but all the more epic because of it. Everything you'd expect from a brand founded by Jamie Thomas, one of the best ever, a man who made a career out of tearing up handrails and who was the first person I ever saw skateboard to Iron Maiden. Mega. Google him.

Girl

Founded in 1993 when some of the best riders in the world at the time (and, some would say, still now) such as Mike Carroll, Rick Howard and Rick McCrank defected from World Industries to set up their own skate brand. According to a video released on their 20th anniversary, the inspiration to use the women’s loo logo came when Carroll took a comfort break in the ladies during a brainstorming session at a café (it's OK, the gents' was locked). I’m betting that a room-full of branding experts on £10,000 a day, sat in a room for a month, couldn’t have come up with anything better.

Text extracted from:http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/skateboard-blog

Aby Lee Hnetinkasfavourite reflection

Old dog, new tricks 

Skating offers the most unlikely eureka moments. The first trick I learned on a board was, like it is for most newbies, a stationary ollie, on the lawn of our parents’ back garden. It felt good but, to be honest, it wasn’t an epiphany because I hadn’t by that stage mastered it while moving. The real "wow-I-might-be-a-proper-skater" moment came when I learnt a technically simple trick called a nose stall, whereby you ride up to a curb, balance your nose (front tip of the board) on it, move your back wheels slightly off the ground and drop back off again. I was shown this ludicrously easy manoeuvre one summer evening 25 years ago, in the carpark at the back of the local carpet shop, by two friends, Big Dave and Jasper. Actually, it was around the same time I learned how to smoke, too, and how to wear a backpack properly (a countercultural move which demanded you wear it over both shoulders like a French exchange student as opposed to on one shoulder, like a townie). 

That's how skaters traditionally learned the dark arts, by a unique osmosis that occurred when hanging around skateparks, multistorey carparks and random local street spots. This gonzo tuition would be backed up by hours of viewing skate videos in slow-motion, attempting to fathom fine margins, angles and feet positioning. However, during my hiatus from skating, the loose concept of skateboarding lessons appeared to become more generally accepted; certainly, parks near where I live now offer special beginner sessions with skate coaches/teachers/Yodas (OK, so that still doesn’t quite sound right) on hand. I used to be a terrible inverted skate snob about this sort of thing when I was younger, under the delusion that skating can only be an enigmatic, renegade outsider culture, an anti-sport that eschews essential components of other games – like winning or playing kit or, yes, coaching. Now, I’m either too old to care or maybe I’ve realised the traditional, unstructured, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach can coexist with a more organised or formal way. For some, skating will continue to be passed down as a kind of beautiful, amorphous folklore, but for others, younger skaters in particular – for whom it’s not a great idea to hang around London’s Southbank or their local Asda carpark at 10pm on a school night – that eureka moment might well come with a little help from patient, helpful and, still, no doubt, fully rad skate coaches at local parks. 

You could call Hector Barnett a skate coach, I guess, as he takes skateboarding lessons at London’s Bay Sixty 6 park. And you can definitely call him rad. In celebration of the release of new film xXx: Return Of Xander Cage, and in particular the opening scene in which Vin Diesel skates like a badass, the film’s press team organised for me to have a skate masterclass. And during a single, hour-long session, Barnett managed to get this old dog to do two new tricks that had always eluded me: a frontside disaster (a 180 ollie out of the ramp to land with your board on the coping, aka metal bar) and a switch heelflip (stand back to front and flip the board around with your heel).

After watching me rattle through my basic repertoire – ollies, kickflips, heelflips, very poor backside 180s etc – Hector suggested a few changes to feet position on certain tricks, some adjustments to where to put my weight upon landing and my angles of approach. It was all subtle advice, and fairly simple, but elements I’m usually too stubborn to consider, or too lazy to persevere with. Usually I keep hammering away at a trick until, by some kind of luck, I manage to land it or, more often than not, fall off and try an easier trick. But being encouraged to concentrate on small adjustments focused my mind and body, and the guidance and reassurance got me so amped up that, once we moved to the quarter pipe, and I moved my front foot slightly further forward, rode a little faster, kept my back foot straighter… I finally nailed the trick within 15 minutes. Eureka!

Having a skate lesson wasn’t a ghastly experience, unlike having golf coaching, where you’re told that everything you’ve ever learned is wrong, your swing is unpicked and you leave feeling broken. It was more collaborative, less preachy, just wise words about obvious mistakes that I was making on tricks that I’d never really thought to adjust, and lots and lots of encouragement. The 360 flip, however, still eludes me, and I suspect that no amount of coaching will help me land it. Well, maybe fitness coaching to help me lose about four stone and become as flexible as a 14-year-old – but I can’t see that happening.

Text extracted from:http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/skateboard-blog

Aby Lee Hnetinka

I’m a sk8er girl, what else should I say? Taking my message to all the ladies in this country, showing them that we can do what guy do even better than them. Currently training for the 2018^th Skaters Tournament, heads will roll once they see the new tricks I’ve prepared. The worst mistake is to underestimate me, I might be girly but I’m also strong as hell.