Skateboards...

In my younger days, when I would do nothing but go skateboarding all summer long with my friends, at least once a day we would end up talking about how it would be the ultimate coolness if we could somehow make our own skateboards with custom graphics on them. Well, It took a while but now it's possible to have your own custom deck without having to be sponsored by Powell Peralta or Santa Cruz...

I've seen other websites where you can upload images to put on skateboards but this is the first time I actually tried it. I created an account on Zazzle, www.zazzle.com/echesketch, and have used some illustrations I've done and slapped them bad boys on some wood. Sooner or later I'll be ordering one of these and will go out and shred like it's 1985.

I've been ripped off... UPDATE

I'm writing this update since I still get e-mails from people asking me what ever happened with the situation where some web design company earlier in the year stole a logo I designed and used it as their own.

After being informed that the logo I designed had been blatantly ripped off I contacted the owner of the company, (which is actually just a couple of guys) via email and asked them to stop using my design. The following are the e-mails we exchanged after that.

THIEF:
We've never heard of you. You approach me like I do not have an
established company. Please refrain from threatening me like a child.


ME:
Established or not that is my logo you are using. I did not just start my business the other day either. Are you claiming that you created the logo? Or did you hire a designer to create your company logo who most likely took my work and sold it to you to make a quick buck.


THIEF:
We have never seen your logo or heard of your company. I am being falsely
accused.


After that I got my lawyer to send a cease and desist letter to the thief and within a week the entire site was taken down. The last time a checked they had a brand-spanking new site, which by the way I quickly found out was created by using a template from one of those template websites.

Missing: Carlisle Thundering Herd logo...

As I walked down the ice cream isle last night at the grocery store I saw a display of shirts and hats for the local high school sports team. I thought I would check it out since I did the logo for the school a long while back and I wanted to see what they finally did with my design. Unfortunately the logo I did was nowhere to be seen. Instead I saw another logo, clipart perhaps, that I had nothing to do with. At that moment I may have looked cool, calm and collected on the outside. But internally I was on the verge of breaking into a conniption fit unlike any that has ever been witnessed by anyone in the state of Pennsylvania!

Flash back six years while I was still working for "The Man". I somehow managed to get volunteered to create a new sports logo for the local high school by my boss at the time. What started out as a simple redesign of one logo eventually turned into a huge project with multiple versions of the logo for different uses, separate icons and logo combinations for each team sport, desktop backgrounds and all sorts of other extra things... A massive amount of work went into designing the new logo and everything else that went along with it and after about two months the finished product was pretty good. Since completing the project I have not seen the logo anywhere. Not on team uniforms, at events, on the school website, nothing! I did hear rumors that a friend of a friends cousins girlfriends moms friends neighbor thought she may have seen someone with a sweater that had the logo on it. I have yet to be able to confirm that though. The designs apparently got sucked up through a rift in the Spacetime Continuum and are currently floating around in the 8th dimension somewhere never to be seen again.