Interview with Neil Staley, designer for Ride Snowboards
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::Where did you work before working for Ride, and what experience did you gain in the design industry prior to breaking into the snowboard industry?
I’ve been working as a graphic designer for the same company for nearly fifteen years, so the majority of work I’ve been asked to do has been corporate or industry themed, such as corporate logo development, brochure design and marketing/advertising stuff.
More recently, over the past, say, three years, we’ve been touching more on the web design side of things and that’s given me the chance to be a lot more diverse with my creative skills, which I subsequently took across into the rest of my work with some unexpected results.
Outside of work I come from a graffiti background, from back in the 80’s when I used to sit and draw characters and pieces for hours. We did a few community projects and bombed a few walls and it was a great outlet for my art. I’d love to just saddle up some cans and go out one night armed with a sketch and a lookout.
So, computers basically took over and I had to learn a whole bunch of new skills from scratch. I mean, the college stuff I did was, like in 1988 so it’s totally useless in today’s design office environment. Apart from some of the basics which still ring true, there really isn’t much I can bring from what I learned back then to what I do now.
As for platforms and format, I was handed a PC with Corel Draw and told to get on with it. Yeah, I argued for a Mac for a little while but got nowhere so basically threw myself at the PC and played around a lot with the software.
It’s not true that a decent PC and some good graphics software will make an artist out of anyone. I mean, it does make things a lot easier in many ways, but you still gotta have that eye and know what to do and in the right order. It’s just not a case of click, whiz, done, and I’m glad it isn’t. Where’d be the fun in that?

::How did you end up designing boards for Ride?
I got into messing around with snowboard graphics a couple of years ago. I started riding a year before that and my attention was drawn steadily more toward the boards and what was on them. Then I learned more about the companies that make them and drew a kind of mental short list of the boards I really liked because of the artwork I was seeing.
In the end I was drawing stuff and a friend said why didn’t I try to get in touch with one of the companies to see if I could do some stuff for them. At first I just thought about the huge, unscalable corporate ladders I’d have to try and climb but contacted Burton and Ride first off anyway. I heard back from Burton pretty quickly and they were quite cold, saying that they only used these super special design studios to get their graphics done – so that kinda put me off right away.
Still, I kinda pestered Ride with little nudges and finally got an email from their creative director telling me now’s my chance to send some stuff over and impress them. I shat myself initially and just thought ‘Crap, now what do I do? What if they hate the stuff I’ve done? What do I send?’ See, basically, after talking to lots of people in the industry and loads of riders about it, it kinda dawned on me from the start that this would be a pretty big deal if I managed to pull it off. I mean, look at the company I would be in: Rodney Matthews has done work for Lord of the Rings and Syd Meade is a top, top sci-fi artist, both world renowned artists, just to name two.
So, after a couple of hours chewing my fingers to the bone I decided on half a dozen pieces to send across as samples and just keep my fingers crossed. What the hell right? I had nothing to lose really so it was a give all lose nothing situation.
It was a few weeks and I was convinced I’d failed miserably. I emailed Ride and politely asked them to mail me back and tell me if my work was good or bad, just so I knew. I got a reply right back saying that they were looking at it and that one of the designs might work for a new girl’s board series they were bringing out for the 2003/4 season. He said he was showing this one design to a focus group to get some feedback.
Lo and behold a couple of weeks later I got an email with just a phone number and instructions to call it. I was convinced it wasn’t gonna happen but called and the guy said that they’d decided that they didn’t want me to do a board for them – so I sighed and said ‘well ok, thanks anyway’ – and he said, ‘no, we want you to do four.’ For the second time since I was about three, I shat myself again but was just too excited to notice the smell.
And so it began in July of last year. Right from the word go I was running to a tight deadline because the artwork needed to be done to go to approval and then on to print by the end of August. I was given a kind of brief, more like a theme, and the ball was rolling. The hard part was that the whole thing was basically design-to-order, meaning I had to come up with four separate designs based around a common theme, and I didn’t have much time to do it. The first one was more or less there but needed some work to tidy it up, but the other three had to be invented from scratch.



There was a lot of research involved and I had to join the local libraries to get hold of books that would allow me to read up on the subject matter and hopefully give me the inspiration I needed to get something down on paper.
The second board came quite quickly from an idea I saw on a tv advert, and it was pretty much accepted right away with a few tweaks here and there. But the third board? This was my nemesis for a few weeks. The theme idea came from the creative director at Ride. He kinda said ‘I’d like to see this kinda thing, can you do that?’ So I said yes and hit the hat trick of pant crapping as I wondered how I was gonna pull it off. After a LOT of book reading and scanning of photos and images, sketching and playing around on the PC, I had a concept and began sending samples to Ride. Suffice to say that it took quite a few amended samples to get where we needed to be, but in the end I managed to hit the nail on the head after I was told to relax because I was just trying too hard. This was a new ballpark for me and no matter what I thought I knew I did doubt whether or not I had what it would take.
Still, after the last sample went off, the reply came back that it was the one, so I had to move on to the last board with a week to go til deadline day. Again I was given an outline for what was wanted but no matter how I tried I couldn’t come up with something I thought would work. Then, a day before the deadline I threw something together and sent it across and ‘bingo’ they loved it.
Four boards in about five weeks and one of them took three weeks alone. With the last amendments done and the final artwork composed I FTP’d the files across to Ride and got around to washing my pants. Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware of my level of skill and I was always confident that I’d be able to do the job, but with the time constraints and working with people who do this sort of thing day in and day out kinda puts a more urgent slant on things and the pressure is there right from the start. You really can’t afford to sit back one day and think ‘well, I might do some board artwork today’. You have to be on it from day one and cane it until it’s finished because the big difference is that you’re trying to make someone else happy with your artwork instead of just yourself.

::What are you plans for the future?
With the new season beginning to draw to a close, I’m already conceptualising for 2004/5 graphics. They work well over a year ahead and it takes that long at least to go from finalisation of artwork to delivery of the finished boards to distributors. If I had the opportunity to do a board project every year I would be well happy. Much more than that and I’d consider taking it up full time – which is my ultimate aim, well, to at least be designing in the boarding industry, say for a magazine or something like that.

::What advice can you give to up-and-coming designers, people trying to get into doing this type of thing themselves?
If I were to offer any advice at all to anyone trying to get into designing board graphics it would be to firstly stay true to yourself and not to create something that you think other people want to see. Originality is precious so stick with it, no matter what. Also, try to get your work up on a website and tout that a bit. It’s easy for companies to spot artwork if it’s somewhere they can see it! They won’t know it exists if you keep it on your hard drive or on a drawing board, so get it out there and get it seen. And if someone says you need to go to art school to make it, tell em to p*ss off. Use what you have and don’t be afraid to believe in yourself and your abilities.

Interview by Alex de la Haye
Step-On Magazine

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