October 31, 2026

The Art Under Your Feet: A History of Skateboard Graphics

From hand-drawn crosses on Dogtown decks to skulls, screaming hands and the provocative rip-offs of the 1990s: how the bottom of a skateboard became one of the most influential art forms of the last fifty years.

Intro

Turn a skateboard over and you are looking at one of the most widely seen art forms of the last half century. The graphic on the bottom of a deck is scraped away within weeks, yet many of those images have become icons, collected, exhibited and copied worldwide.

This article traces how skateboard graphics developed, from the first hand-drawn designs in the 1970s to the art boards of today. We describe the artwork rather than reproduce it: the designs are protected by copyright, and the sources at the bottom link to the artists, companies and archives where you can see them.

Before the graphics: logos and laminates

In the early 1970s, a skateboard's look was mostly about the material. According to Dogtown co-founder Wes Humpston, interviewed by the collector site Cal Streets, most decks carried a flat, one-colour logo and some lettering, while some fibreglass boards had photo or pattern laminates. Nobody, as far as he remembers, was drawing on boards.

Dogtown: the first drawn graphics

That changed in Santa Monica and Venice. Humpston had been drawing art for the Z-Boys and other local skaters through the 1970s. After the Zephyr team broke up, he and Jim Muir started Dogtown Skates around 1975–76. Muir drew the cross with sun lines, Humpston did the lettering, and the logo was inspired by artist and writer Craig Stecyk. Their first board was a 10 × 30-inch deck called the Bulldog.

Cal Streets calls Humpston one of the pioneers, "if not the pioneer", of deck graphics. Humpston himself is careful about claiming to be first. What is clear is that the Dogtown cross, drawn by hand and then reproduced on production boards, set the template: a deck could carry art, not just a brand.

The 1980s: skulls, dragons and a screaming hand

The 1980s turned deck graphics into an industry. Two companies and two artists defined the decade.

Powell Peralta and Vernon Courtlandt Johnson

Powell Peralta was founded in 1978 by George Powell and Stacy Peralta. Its graphics were drawn by Vernon Courtlandt "Court" Johnson, George Powell's brother-in-law, who joined to help build the business. According to PBS SoCal's Artbound, his skulls, swords and dragons appeared on boards, clothing and stickers, mostly in stark black and white.

Johnson's influences included heavy metal, M.C. Escher and Robert Crumb. He saw the skull as a symbol of the human brain and its power to create, and the company's recurring dragon as a symbol of unstoppable strength. Powell Peralta's team, the Bones Brigade, carried those images into skate videos and onto bedroom walls around the world.

Santa Cruz and Jim Phillips

Further north, Jim Phillips was art director for NHS Inc., the company behind Santa Cruz Skateboards, through the 1970s and 1980s. He had started out drawing surf cartoons and surfboard art. His first published work appeared in Surfer Quarterly in 1962.

In 1985, Santa Cruz began using a Phillips drawing that would become one of the most recognised images in skateboarding: the Screaming Hand. According to Surfer Today, the idea grew out of Phillips' cartoons of a hand rising from the water like a drowning swimmer. Adding a screaming mouth turned it into a logo. It was first used to promote a wheel and is still central to the Santa Cruz brand four decades later.

Phillips also drew the Santa Cruz lettering, the Independent Trucks cross logo and many pro models. He was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2017.

The 1990s: shock, satire and "rip-off" graphics

In the late 1980s and 1990s, street skating took over from vert, boards became narrower and cheaper, and a new generation of companies wanted to shake things up. The most influential was World Industries, run by Steve Rocco.

Its art department, where Marc McKee and Sean Cliver worked, reshaped what a graphic could be. According to Vice, their boards poked fun at corporate logos, other skate companies and anything considered respectable. Examples include a 1992 "rip-off" of the Travelodge bear for a Chico Brenes pro model, and the Bye Bye Kitty board for Blind's Guy Mariano around 1992–93.

Many of these graphics were deliberately provocative. Love them or hate them, they turned the deck into a space for satire and provocation, and they still define how many people think of 1990s skateboarding.

Cliver later collected the history of the art form in the book Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art (2004). According to Skate and Annoy, it shows over a thousand decks from about three decades. The title says something about the medium: an artwork made to be destroyed.

Punk, art and the gallery

Skateboard graphics never existed in isolation. They borrowed from punk flyers, comics, tattoo art and graffiti, and gave back just as much.

Raymond Pettibon, whose drawings and four-bar logo defined the look of Black Flag, gave punk a visual language that skaters adopted. (Read our article on LA punk and skateboarding.)
Jim Phillips published several books of his work, including The Skateboard Art of Jim Phillips (2007).
Today, decks by well-known artists are released in limited editions, shown in galleries and collected as art objects, sometimes never ridden at all.

Why skate graphics matter

A few reasons skateboard graphics became so influential:

They are everywhere. Every board in every skatepark carries one, so millions of young people see them daily.
They are personal. A pro model graphic is part of a skater's identity, much like an album cover is for a band.
They are temporary. Graphics wear off in weeks, so companies release new ones constantly, which keeps the art form moving fast.
They are independent. Small companies could print what they wanted, which made decks a place for experiment, humour and rebellion.

Timeline

Year	Event
Early 1970s	Decks mostly carry simple logos or laminates
c. 1975–76	Wes Humpston and Jim Muir start Dogtown Skates; hand-drawn cross graphics
1978	Powell Peralta founded; Vernon Courtlandt Johnson creates its skull and dragon imagery
1985	Jim Phillips' Screaming Hand first used by Santa Cruz
Early 1990s	World Industries' satirical graphics by Marc McKee and Sean Cliver
2004	Sean Cliver's book Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art
2017	Jim Phillips inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame