Apart from the skate park, the hub of local skater communities tend to congregate around the local premium skateboard shops, where every conceivable type of gear for board and body can be compared and purchased at a premium price.

             Many shops practice crossover with other board-oriented extreme sports, stocking equipment for similar forms of recreation like surfing, snowboarding, water sports dirt biking, even rollerblading and skiing. But for the serious skater, none of these variety stores can match the selection and staff of a dedicated skateboard shop.

             For one thing, while general sporting goods might have a rack of boards and a shelf of shoes next to the T-shirts and hoodies, they aren’t likely to be able to help with customization. The boards will be commercial models, sold as completes without options. The staff will as likely as not lack  knowlegability about such subtleties as the different needs of street and vert skaters. And while the prices will be lower, the quality will be too. So unless you’ve already decided on your board and see it on the shelf for a bargain, skip the “all-purpose” store and focus on skateboard shops where they speak your language.

             Plenty of skateboard shops sponsor their own teams that compete in big skate matches. In the tradition of old school skate team Zephyr named after Zephyr Surfboard Productions Shop, the shop which sponsored them out of Dogtown- a section of Santa Monica where skateboarding as we know it was popularized- the first sponsored skate team to achieve widespread fame, and brought quite a bit of recognition to their benefactor.

 Skate shops have a reputation for being active in the general community as well as large skate events, PUSH Skateshop, for example, has become a creative hub in North Carolina. Beyond selling a carefully selected array of the highest quality skateboard parts and supplies, PUSH sponsors their own award-winning skate team as well as up-and-coming artists, providing a venue for the creation and distribution of rising stars in the iconic contemporary art world.

 Because the skateboarding community is still skating by on the fringe of acceptable society, skateboard shops also function as critical countercultural hubs of activity.

 Cal Skate Skateboards, one of the oldest and certainly the largest skate shop on the north coast, establishing themselves in Portland, Oregon in 1976, also runs Zeitgeist Art Gallery and helps to maintain a number of local skate parks. Cal Skate also produces its own line of political as well as more abstract artistic skateboard decks, providing local artists with an opportunity to get their art flying all around town under the feet of countless skaters.

 Skates on Haight, now known as SkateboardSF has been doing a lot for the skater image in the city since they opened their first store, called Skateboard City at the time, on world-famous Haight Street in 1974. They’ve changed their name a few times, but are still located in the heart of skater country, hilly San Francisco, and stick to their same old-school ideals.

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Branding is as important in the skate world as it is in music gear or automotive tools. Whenever high-quality personal tools of the trade are brought to the market for sophisticated consumers to lust after, image is the magic ingredient that combines a manufacturer’s name with word-of-mouth endorsements that build the base of any company’s success.

Skateboard riders are a particularly loyal bunch, plastering favored makes on board and bodies alike. There is no end to the free advertisement an equipment manufacturer can expect to get, not only on the boards themselves, but on clothing, shoes, tattoos, stickers scattered at popular urban obstacle courses-and of course graffiti.

The logos plastered to a deck say as much about the personality of the skater as the characteristics of the board. While many noobs follow the endorsement of a celebrity skater in choosing their brand, most follow the picture that matches the self-image and style the skater is striving after.

Skateboard logos have become an art form of identification. The dominant style is grainy and raw, often black and white and tending toward a hand-drawn appearance, like the popular etnies and Darkstar marks, although a growing subgenre uses tight, often psychedelic fonts to match exotic-sounding brands, such as Osiris and Satori, or a neat, clean cut look like Burton or Adio favored by straight-edgers.

The outlaw mentality of skateboard culture is reflected in many logo designs. Others integrate common icons, like the Goth Iron Cross used by Independent and Flip, that connect the skater with various subcultures related to music and general outlook on life. Other logos using the art and script associated with punk, heavy metal, house music and rap are displayed by the fans of those music genres who skate.

The overwhelming tone of skateboard logos reflects an aggressive, “kick-ass” approach to life appropriate to the risk-takers and daredevils using the equipment. Riding a board also takes a good sense of humor to shake off the days bruises, and plenty of brands tend toward the outrageously comical, such as the evil flaming grin of Spitfire, Maple, and World Industries logos, appealing to the wry wit usual among streetwise skateboarding enthusiasts.

Many top skate logo designs, like Black Label, DC Shoe and ZERO, generally tend toward hard edges and sharp corners, much like the urban geography where guerilla athletes play, often with a splatter-paint effect reminiscent of another prime urban pastime: tagging. Still others, like Billabong and QuickSilver, express the surfer-roots of riding a board.

Naturally, a hardcore of purists rage against all this commercialism, claiming with considerable justice that becoming moving billboards for skate equipment firms is as counter to the spirit of independent extreme sport as pimping for Pepsi or McDonalds.

Nevertheless, the trend is to kick such old-school attitudes to the curb. Today and as far as the eye can see, the majority of decks will continue to bear signs of the proud allegiance and fierce loyalty evoked by skateboarding logos among their brands’ fledgling as well as experienced users.

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