YEAR: Winter 2021
SIZE:66 pages
TEAM:Jordan Meerdink, Dominic Fortunato, Buzz Szilagyi
I have been building skateboards in my home workshop for over a decade. What started as a small hobby during my high school years has grown into a passion; with experiments in shapes, artwork, fabrication, and materials. This book is a manual for amateur woodworkers to build their own skateboards with tips and methods gained from my own experiences over the years. It is currently on sale at Soft City Printing.
The book was also an exercise in collaborative production. I wrote content, provided photographs, and created instructional diagrams; however, two other designers were instrumental in the final product. Buzz is an artist and graphic designer who provided the characters and illustrations present throughout the book. Dominic, an art director and publisher, focused on layout and production. The typography, colors, paper type, etc can be attributed to his expertise.
Using an extremely bare rough draft as a wireframe, both artists had carte blanche to make use of their specific skills for the final product. This approach was a reaction to my professional projects, where a design lead controls the outcome of the work in a much more hierarchical way. With this freedom successfully carried out, the resulting book is a creative assembly that is much more than the some of its parts.
