Your Board Sucks: A Desperate Attempt to Land A Jr. Designer Position

The other day, I interviewed for a Jr. Designer position at a skate, snow and surf company here in Salt Lake called Primo Distribution. I talked to these fellas for a good two hours. They gave me the grand tour, we talked about art and design and photography. They showed me the collection of vintage 35mm cameras they had down in their work space and before I left, we even had a Pabst together there in the office. I suppose I felt pretty good about the interview afterward. But by the time I got home, due mostly to my predisposed tendency to second-guess myself whenever possible, I began to wonder if my portfolio had been strong enough to have sealed the deal with any real certainty. 

I started to consider that I may need to burn a little bit of the ol' midnight oil like in the old days and cook up something that would help remove all doubt; that I needed to hammer out the sort of design which might serve to put me over the top.

For years now, whenever I found myself having to listen to some suit and necktie prattle on about profit margins, bottom lines, or some otherwise nauseating subject generally conducted by any number of middle-managers I've had the privilege of working with, I'd always bring along my trusty pen and notebook in order to make somewhat more productive use of the time. One of the themes I would often revisit was of a series of figures I had termed "the skull kids", a number of crudely drawn skeletons slouching in highly detailed t-shirts, baggy jeans and sneakers, riding skateboards, playing leap-frog or just giving a bony middle finger to the artist. I had never committed any of them to a portfolio much less attempted to render them in a more artistic fashion with the aid of my trusty Macintosh. But the interview was motivation enough for me to give it a shot. The result was the attached illustration, Your Board Sucks, an image inspired by the visual effect garnered from sitting between two mirrors, resulting in a constantly receding number of reflections that both perpetuate and consume themselves all at once. The best part of the entire project was when I was finally able to reproduce the original image, reapply it to the board and then repeat the process until the image was little more than a series of colored pixels. Aside from the usual couple of nit-picky things that I'd like to modify, I'm fairly pleased with the result. After working on it for only a few hours on Tuesday and then staying up all night last night, I sent one out to the boys at Primo this morning. Keep your fingers crossed, skull kids. I should be hearing back within the week.