The History of Skateboard Deck Graphics: How the Board Became a Canvas

June 17, 2026

History of skateboard deck art guide 2026 DeckArts Berlin evolution blank 1950s boards 1970s graphics 1980s bold illustration 1990s street style gallery decks wall art deck as canvas classic masterworks custom design Grade-A Canadian maple

Last updated: July 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin · 14 min read

Quick answer: Skateboard decks were plain until the mid-1970s. Graphics arrived with Wes Humpston's hand-drawn Dogtown boards, became an industry with Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz in the 1980s, turned confrontational in the street era of the 1990s, and are now collected and exhibited. The reason is economic: a deck is a consumable, so the graphic was the only thing distinguishing one piece of pressed maple from another.

Most accounts of deck graphics describe decades without naming anyone. This one names the people, because the specifics are what make the story worth telling.

The blank years

The first skateboards were improvised. In 1950s southern California, surfers took the trucks and wheels off roller skates and nailed them to planks — the point was to ride when the surf was flat, and there was no reason to decorate anything.

Commercial boards followed in the early 1960s, but the wheels were clay or steel, the ride was dangerous, and the first boom collapsed around 1965 almost as quickly as it had started. For roughly a decade skateboarding was close to dead as an industry. Nothing was printed on the bottom of a board because there was barely a board business to speak of.

The wheel that restarted everything

The revival came from a material, not a design. In the early 1970s Frank Nasworthy began selling polyurethane wheels — sold as Cadillac Wheels — and they changed what a skateboard could do. Urethane gripped, rolled over rough ground, and did not slide out from under the rider the way clay did.

Skating became viable, then popular, and an industry rebuilt itself around it. Santa Cruz Skateboards was founded in 1973. Powell-Peralta followed later in the decade, when George Powell went into partnership with the skater Stacy Peralta. Companies now existed that needed to differentiate themselves — and the flat underside of the board was the only real estate available.

Wes Humpston and the first graphics

The person most often credited with turning that surface into a canvas is Wes Humpston. Working around the Dogtown scene in Venice and Santa Monica in the second half of the 1970s, he drew on the bottoms of boards by hand — crosses, lettering, dense linework — first for himself and friends, then as the identity of Dogtown Skates.

The significance is that the bottom graphic had previously been either nothing or a logo. Humpston treated it as a drawing surface, and the idea stuck immediately. Within a few years every company of any size had someone doing the same thing, and the underside of a deck had become the single most visible piece of design in skateboarding — because it is what the audience sees when a board is in the air.

The 1980s: VCJ and Jim Phillips

Two artists dominate the decade, and their work is still in circulation forty years later.

Vernon Courtlandt Johnson, usually credited as VCJ, produced the visual identity of Powell-Peralta. His skull-and-sword device, the winged ripper, and the pro-model graphics for the Bones Brigade riders put heraldic, gothic and skeletal imagery into mass circulation among teenagers years before that vocabulary reached mainstream design. The drawings are dense, symmetrical and heavy on black — built to read at a distance on a moving board.

Jim Phillips did the equivalent job at Santa Cruz, in a completely different register: bright, loud, cartoon-derived, closer to hot-rod and monster-magazine illustration than to heraldry. His Screaming Hand, drawn in 1985, has outlived the context it was made for and is now one of the most reproduced graphic images of the era — printed on far more shirts and stickers than skateboards.

Both were doing commercial illustration for a sporting goods company. Neither was operating in an art context. That is precisely why the work is as strange as it is.

Why decks carried such strange art

This is the part usually left out, and it explains everything else.

A deck is a consumable. It wears through, delaminates, or snaps, and a skater who rides regularly replaces boards constantly. That single fact drove the whole visual culture.

Because boards wear out, companies sold on repeat purchase. Because a deck from one factory is physically much like a deck from another, there was almost nothing to compete on except the graphic. And because the customers were teenagers who rewarded strangeness rather than a client committee that punished it, the art got pushed into territory no ordinary consumer product would touch — skulls, occult symbols, gore, blasphemy, jokes in poor taste.

There was no gallery to satisfy and no brand-safety review. Skate graphics of this period are one of the few large bodies of commercial illustration produced under almost no constraint, which is why they still look unlike anything else.

The 1990s: smaller boards, sharper jokes

Street skating displaced vert during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the boards changed shape with it — narrower, more symmetrical, with the twin-tip outline still standard today. The graphics changed too.

Steve Rocco's World Industries, founded in 1987, set the tone: graphics that parodied corporate logos, mocked rival companies, and courted offence deliberately, much of it drawn by Marc McKee. Some of it has aged badly and some of it was intended to be indefensible at the time. Either way it moved deck art away from illustration-as-decoration toward graphics as commentary.

At the other end, Girl Skateboards — founded in 1993 with Andy Jenkins and Evan Hecox shaping its look — brought design-school restraint into the same market: cleaner typography, considered layouts, an aesthetic borrowed from mid-century graphic design rather than from monster comics.

The deck as collectible and exhibit

Two things happened from the 2000s onward.

Decks became collectible objects. Original 1980s Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz boards, especially unridden ones, moved into a serious secondary market. Supreme's long-running series of artist collaborations produced decks that were bought to be kept rather than ridden almost from the start, and a complete collection of them was sold at auction by Sotheby's in 2019 — the clearest signal that the objects had left the sporting goods category entirely.

Skaters turned out to be artists. Ed Templeton, who founded Toy Machine, has exhibited painting and photography internationally for decades. The 2004 exhibition and later documentary Beautiful Losers grouped a set of artists who had come out of skate and street culture rather than art school, and made the connection explicit.

The deck was by then a recognised format for artists to work in, and a recognised thing for people to hang on a wall.

Where wall-art decks fit

Decks made specifically as wall art are a later and different development, and it is worth being clear about the distinction rather than blurring it.

A collected 1985 Powell-Peralta board is a historical object: it was made to be ridden, it carries a graphic drawn for that purpose, and its value comes from provenance and scarcity. A deck printed today as wall art is not that. It is a new blank used as a substrate, chosen because the proportion and the material suit the job.

What carries across is the reason the format works at all. Skate artists always composed for a narrow vertical field with rounded ends rather than adapting rectangular pictures to it, and they designed for legibility at distance and in motion. Those are the same requirements as a wall across a room.

The deckarts catalogue takes that surface in two directions: reproductions of paintings in the public domain, covered in the Renaissance, Japanese, Van Gogh, Klimt and modern art guides; and original contemporary designs, covered in the contemporary and pop art guide, which sits closest to the graphic tradition described above.

FAQ

When did skateboards first get graphics?

The mid-to-late 1970s. Boards through the 1950s and 1960s were plain, and the industry nearly disappeared after the first boom collapsed around 1965. The revival came with Frank Nasworthy's polyurethane wheels in the early 1970s, which made skating viable enough for companies to rebuild around — Santa Cruz was founded in 1973, Powell-Peralta later in the decade. Wes Humpston, working around the Dogtown scene in Venice and Santa Monica, is the person most often credited with turning the bottom of the board into a drawing surface rather than a place for a logo, hand-drawing crosses and dense linework first for friends and then as the identity of Dogtown Skates. The idea spread almost immediately, because the underside of a deck is the most visible piece of design in skateboarding — it is what everyone sees when the board is in the air.

Who were the most important skateboard graphic artists?

Two names dominate the 1980s. Vernon Courtlandt Johnson, credited as VCJ, created the visual identity of Powell-Peralta, including the skull-and-sword device and the winged ripper, putting heraldic, gothic and skeletal imagery into mass circulation among teenagers years before mainstream design adopted that vocabulary. Jim Phillips did the equivalent at Santa Cruz in an entirely different register — bright, loud and cartoon-derived, closer to hot-rod and monster-magazine illustration — and his Screaming Hand, drawn in 1985, has become one of the most reproduced graphic images of the era. Earlier, Wes Humpston established the practice itself. In the 1990s, Marc McKee's work for World Industries pushed graphics toward parody and provocation, while Andy Jenkins and Evan Hecox brought design-school restraint to Girl Skateboards.

Why was skateboard art allowed to be so strange?

Because of how the product works economically. A deck is a consumable — it wears through, delaminates or snaps, and a regular skater replaces boards constantly — so companies sold on repeat purchase. Since a deck from one factory is physically much like a deck from another, there was almost nothing to compete on except the graphic. And the customers were teenagers who rewarded strangeness rather than a client committee that punished it. There was no gallery to satisfy and no brand-safety review, which pushed the work into territory no ordinary consumer product would touch: skulls, occult symbols, gore and deliberate offence. Skate graphics of this period are one of the few large bodies of commercial illustration produced under almost no constraint, which is why they still look unlike anything else.

Is a wall-art deck the same as a collectible skateboard?

No, and the distinction is worth keeping clear. An original 1980s Powell-Peralta or Santa Cruz board is a historical object: it was manufactured to be ridden, carries a graphic drawn for that purpose, and derives its value from provenance and scarcity, which is why such boards moved into a serious secondary market and why Sotheby's auctioned a complete collection of Supreme decks in 2019. A deck printed today as wall art is something else — a new blank used as a substrate because the proportion and material suit the job. It is not a historical artefact and does not appreciate in value. What carries across from the tradition is the compositional logic: skate artists always designed for a narrow vertical field with rounded ends, and for legibility at distance, which are the same requirements as a wall seen across a room.

Article summary

Skateboards were plain through the 1950s and 1960s, and the industry nearly collapsed around 1965 before Frank Nasworthy's polyurethane wheels made skating viable again in the early 1970s, allowing companies such as Santa Cruz in 1973 and Powell-Peralta later that decade to rebuild around it. Wes Humpston, working around the Dogtown scene, is most often credited with turning the underside of a board from a logo placement into a drawing surface. The 1980s were defined by two artists in opposite registers: Vernon Courtlandt Johnson's heraldic skull-and-sword work for Powell-Peralta, and Jim Phillips's bright cartoon-derived graphics for Santa Cruz, including the Screaming Hand of 1985. The strangeness of the work has an economic explanation: a deck is a consumable, one piece of pressed maple is much like another, so the graphic was the only point of difference, and the teenage audience rewarded exactly what a client committee would have removed. The 1990s brought narrower street boards, the parody and provocation of World Industries, and the design-school restraint of Girl Skateboards. From the 2000s decks became collectible and skate-derived artists entered galleries. Decks made today as wall art are a separate development — new blanks used as a substrate, carrying across the compositional logic rather than the provenance.

About the author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of deckarts, a graphic designer and print specialist originally from Ukraine, now based in Berlin, where he personally designs and prepares every deck.