British Snowboard Speed Record 151.72kph

So when I am not doing design work, I like to film extreme sports, however sometimes it's good to be the one in front of the camera as take part yourself.
Three years ago I decided that I wanted to break the British Snowboard Speed record, this was currently held by Jamie Barrow, one of the British boardercross racers.

I managed to get sponsorship from Ruroc helmets and Windlip Snowboards, we did some testing of their current boards and developed one specifically for the attempt, it has almost zero side cut, raised rails and carbon fibre topsheet to keep it rigid. Cork was also added around the nose to help dampen any vibrations that might be caused if it was not a perfectly smooth surface.

Although that seemed simple, that was the easy part, the hard part was getting permission to use the slope. With only 3 slopes fast enough in the world to use it quickly narrows down options of where to go, fortunately all of these were in the alps, unfortunately 2 of these were closed. Verbier glacier slipped meaning the slope no longer existed and Les Arcs, famously the fastest and longest of the speed runs was closed by the lift operating company as they did not feel the risk it brought to the slope equaled the monetary gains of those who came to the slope for speed events.
Leaving Vars the only slope still fast enough to reach the speeds needed, being run not by the main lift company or town but by an individual who was very anti snowboard means that it is almost impossible to find out when the slope is open. Two unsuccessful trips last season made me tentative about going all the way again only to be disappointed, however sometime you just have to go for it and hope that things will eventually work out...and they did.
The weather was clear and training was on for the skiers, not all the slope was bashed so we only had some to practice with, I did a few runs getting into it, hitting around 100kph, then 130 kph on the first day. With the slope pisted higher the next day it was great conditions snow wise, however there was an extremely strong cross wind, this didn't cause huge problems for me, just made it harder to keep straight and tucked up.

On my second run I managed to equal the British speed record reaching 151.72kph:





I did one more run, although reaching a higher top speed I had to put in a heavy turn to keep stable, only averaging 138kph average over the 100m measued distance.

Until next year!

2015 a New Year, New designs

A new year and time for a slight refresh for The Kitesurf Centre.

We decided that many of the customers liked their previous circular stickers so we have continued with these designs with a slight change in terms of the colourways. The majority of their clients prefered the Blue with others opting for the purple and a few the pink, the yellow was the least favoured firstly the colours had not come out quite as planned ,the print quality had been quite low and the company has since closed, but also the yellow did not match up with many of the boards or footstraps colour schemes which is where most of the stickers are placed.
Looking into this I have designed this years stickers by first looking at some of the main Kitesurfing brands that are stocked by the centre, such as North, Liquid Force and Airush and seen which are their colours for this season. Using this info and after speaking with customers over their prefered colour of stickers and boards I then proceeded to produce the new circular stickers.
I do the main basis for the design in illustrator as I find using vectors for the kites and swirl much easier especially at the stage where colours are constantly changing and then do any finishing touches in photoshop.

There were a few slight changed to the text to make it a little easier to read at a glance however nothing noticeable without looking at them back to back.

Green is one of the new colours, this is used on many of the 2015 kiteboards and I went for quite a neutral green so that it works with more of the other colours on a board rather than the clashing style I used on the last batch.

The other design idea I wanted to visit was one where the brand name was more prominent, or even the basis for the design itself. An advantage to this is that it could be used more for marketing on items such as car bumper stickers, on seeing the deisgn The Kitesurf Centre chose to do a large and a small of this so it could still be used on board or other items.