Vintage Skateboard Magazine Advert Gallery

I’ve been working on a new addition to the Galleries section of Skate and Annoy. It’s an archive of advertisements from old skateboard magazines. The goal is to cover the 60’s through the 90’s. It’s been interesting going through these old magazines, finding things I’d forgotten about and other I still have no idea ever existed, like the Brian Martin pro model on Action Sports Skateboards. It’s funny to see some of the ads that the smaller companies put out in hopes of breaking into the industry. Like everything on the site, it’s a work in progress. I’ve scanned about 300 ads so far and uploaded only 64, but now that the mechanism is in place it’s really easy to add new ones. There are other ad archives out there, most notably the one at Cal Streets, which I profiled in 2008. They’ve since changed they way their gallery is presented, but it’s still a hefty one. I decided to make one for S&A because I have OCD, and I don’t like having to search/link on other sites when doing “research” for posts here. Plus those other galleries aren’t organized how I’d want them.

What works so far: Everything is tagged by company, rider, product type, year, decade, magazine, magazine issue, and photographer if they are credited. So if you want to sort through ads by any one of those taxonomies, you can.

Things that need work: The navigation and layout is a little clunky right now, and likely will be for the time being while I concentrate on adding new ads. Some of the scans are not the greatest quality. I tried using one of those sheet fed scanners (Brother) and it just doesn’t do a very good job a lot of the time. After I run through the ads that I’ve already scanned (rescanning some of the worst offenders) I’ll be switching to a different scanner. I’d like to add an advanced search so you could do something like search of all ads from Z Products from the 80’s, or all ads with Jason Lee riding for Blind.

PLEASE leave some feedback on ways to improve, keeping in mind that there will be other decades and magazines to be added. Now go visit the Vintage Skateboard Magazine Advert Gallery

– Kilwag