Baby’s first skateboard
Soon after baby Ewan was born I thought it would be fun to design a custom skateboard for him. I’ve been into skateboards since I was 14 and always thought it would be fun to come up with my own design. Ewan gave me the inspiration for a design, so I decided to get my crayons out and see what I could come up with.
My two favourite deck design styles are: product/logo inspired designs like Chocolate’s Vespa and Pellegrino by Evan Hecox, or many of the Girl decks by Andy Jenkins; and secondly decks that combine vector art with photography like the Enjoi Kitten Dreams design by Winston Tseng.
So for my first custom deck design I wanted to combine those two styles. I had already taken the pic of Ewan and he looked like he was trying to burst out of something, so I thought the Kinder egg was a nice idea.
I recreated the Kinder egg design in Illustrator, then took it into Photoshop to composite it with the photo, background and various bits of text.
There are a few nice wee touches in there, like the weight being his actual birth weight, and his birthday as the ‘hatch by’ date. Hopefully he’ll appreciate all the thought that went into it… one day.
More than likely, by the time he’s old enough to ride it he’ll say there’s no way I’m riding that baby board… it’s SOOOO embarrassing. Which, I suppose, is kinda the point — I want to keep it!
Actually getting the thing produced proved more difficult than I’d expected. There aren’t many companies that offer full colour printing directly onto proper concaved decks. My first attempt was to go with the generic custom print shop Zazzle, but they weren’t comfortable with the logo copyright issues.
After a bit more hunting around I discovered BoardPusher, based in Denver, Colorado. They’re one of the original (possibly the original) companies to offer custom deck printing, and all the reviews I could find suggested they did a good job.
I placed my order about three weeks ago, and within a few days it had been completed and shipped. The big wait was international shipping — the gap from “Departed San Francisco” to “Arrived UK” was almost a full week — but it did finally arrive, and was absolutely perfect. The BoardPusher guys did an amazing job.
I had been planning to keep it as a wall hanging deck, without any trucks or wheels, but Tara convinced me otherwise. So, a few days ago I ordered some matching Enuff trucks and Corelite wheels and got the thing built up.  I topped it off with some clear grip tape, because it seemed a shame to completely hide the Canadian Maple on both sides.
Here are a couple more pics of the finished item…
