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Challenge: Founded in 1981, Thrasher Magazine was still the most popular and most well known skateboard magazine eleven years later in 1992. However, as skateboarding was changing from an almost exclusively white, suburban pursuit to a multi-racial, urban activity, a generation of skaters were left looking for a magazine that would represent this new, more urbanized lifestyle.

Solution: High Speed Productions, Thrasher¹s publisher, started a second, smaller magazine, Slap , and put a small group of young skaters in charge of it. After a year of black-and-white newsprint publication,  I was hired to manage the day-to-day production and art direction of the magazine as it switched to glossy, four-color publication. Though we were only 64 pages, from the outset, we decided we wanted to differentiate ourselves visually and editorially from the other skateboard magazines. As a group, we chose the stories for each coming issue, never planning more than a month in advance. We covered hip, independent music and underground art. We changed the cover logo each issue. We used digital design and collage together. We constantly experimented. And we were small enough initially (30,000 issues) to slip under the legal radar with things like the National Geographic cover. The popularity of the magazine boomed. We added advertisers, pages, and staff, and the print run began a steady climb. By the time I left in 1995, the page count had passed 120, and we were printing 150,000 copies of Slap each month. Slap continues to be the most visually and musically progressive skateboard magazine in the industry.