So Ron did a post the other day giving you a tour of his desk. I figured I’d give you a tour of what I look at through the day at Rome. It pretty much starts and ends with my email inbox.

The craziness of my job kicks in around the start of August and runs through the trade shows in January. If everything has gone right, February and March can be “more” realistic (not the worst for getting my shred on). May through July are all about getting ready for August through October.

During the busy time of year, I run this Advanced Find thing in my Outlook. It’s interesting to me to see just how much different items are going back and forth.

So first figure there’s about 22 working days in September. I received 2811 emails in my inbox this month…so that’s an average of about 130 mails per week day. I generally don’t include the emails in my search that I have rules on and get sorted into other folders (auto ship confirmations, Data backup confirmations, Warehouse receiving files, etc.). Also, my junk mail filters are pretty good so this does not include those for the most part.

What are the mails? Well it could be anything from an urgent delivery to a shop in Canada or working with our Ukrainian distributor to have them pick their boards up. This particular image has a lot of international distributor stuff in it.

It is interesting how the Internet has totally changed this all. I mean what would I do with out it? Just think, you’d just be playing Tetris right now instead of getting to this part and wondering how you get that five minutes back.

song of the day

See you in a few weeks.

Today is Kyle Sauter’s last day here at Rome.  He’s been working with us up here in the design office for six months and we have all come to like him a lot.  He started out as an intern and was hired on through the summer as a guest designer.  From board designs, premier posters, ads, to tees this guy handles shit.  He’s here until the last of us leaves at night and I finally beat his ass to the office yesterday morning.  Most Monday’s he comes into work with a new personal project he’s been working on and they are always dope.

Thanks a lot Kyle for all the hard work and we’ll miss you around here. Good luck in Spain (lucky bastard). Check out his mostly non Rome related work at http://www.kylesauter.com  as for the product he did for us, you won’t see that until 2010. Keep in touch.

Oh and that gold statue in the bottom left hand corner of his picture, that’s the Six Inch Ruler award, it goes to design interns who work their ass off.  He’s the second recipient of this most prestigious award, the first…me.

Rome is full of wonderful people, amazing talents, and hard as fuck workers. These same people could simultaneously be described as hooligans, trouble-makers, fun-havers, ass-holes, ne’er-do-wells and other such hyphen-ized verbal creations unmentionable here.

Needless to say, sometimes you have to watch your back around these parts, or you’re going to end up without any pens. Or your glue stick stash is going to disappear (I don’t even remember how to design without a glue stick!). Or a rank air freshener hidden away somewhere in the padding of your desk chair. Or maybe someone might set off a smoke bomb under your car then point out the window of your office saying “PADDOCK - what’s wrong with your car, dude!!!”

Us designers at the SDS devised a certain way of keeping tabs on our ever-important cork-backed rulers (I really don’t know how you can design without these things either…), and it has extended into any personal office item that may be in high demand. Simply tracking down your ruler after someone INEVITABLY walks off with this precious tool is not enough. Each ruler-less person is allowed 3 strikes before they are permanently banned for life. A strike qualifies as borrowing an item and failing to return it, and strikes are recorded on the cork-side of each person’s ruler, as you see on mine below.

You’ll notice that interns, as a whole, only have 3 strikes… Future art-department interns be warned.

I’ve implemented a slightly more stringent policy for my tape roll (another item in ridiculously high demand around here) to much success! There is no strike system here, as my tape roll is extremely valuable to me (distressed type, anyone?). Any person who fails to return this item is stricken for life at once. Ron was the inspiration here, after absconding with my tape for weeks on end - as he will sometimes do. Now, my tape dispenser will forever bear the warning “NO RON”.

Interns are done with this one as well.

So - tip of the day: Those of you out there who seem to be perpetually chasing down your stapler, or your phone, try installing this system of checks and balances in your office for a more streamlined work flow, free of personal thievery.

In the future I’ll try to give you the perspective of the small, but growing Rome Europe microstate, based in Munich, Germany.

Since Europe is slightly smaller than the US and Bavaria is pretty close to Austria I have the luxury of being able to go to all sorts of events, premiers, contests or just go snowboarding in a bunch of different resorts  throughout the year.

One of these events was the skidome event “Parkzeit” in western Germany. Since snow was nowhere in sight yet and all riders were eager to get back on snow, artificial or not, we easily got a car with four people packed and some friends from Innsbruck joined us spontaniously. Even though I should have known from last years trip, I somehow forgot what a hassle it was!

In The Rome Car: Silvia Mittermüller who never was in a skidome before and didn’t have to be convinced at all, Nadine, a local rider, our intern and me, the designated driver. In the second car which started in Innsbruck (Austria): Austrian team rider Steve Grumser, and the funniest people we could have brought along the trip, three Austrian Voelkl riders, Angi, Simon and Michi.

All of us were excited to go, the Romans met at the office, Silli managed to pack everything into the small car and off we went. But after 7 hours in a car, a few stops to get some food, drinks or just say hi to the one or the other guy working in front of a toilet, we arrived at the skidome at around 1am and were as tired as can be.

late and still on the road

The next morning  everything looked slightly different. Here a nice pic of the abstruse construction the next pictures were taken in ( kinda weird when you think of this while you’re in there)

Allrounder - Neuss Skihalle

So we all went snowboarding as long as our non trained muscles allowed and the snow turned out to be totally different than the snow we mountain riders were used to.

skidome from the inside

I think everybody who tried the rails (I don’t ride rails!), learned that they were different too and had a nice unwanted phisical contact with it… but some were kinda different anyway. this one for example

one big rail - no comment

That night, although planned for days, we didn’t go out at all. Everybody was way toö tired and the next day was the main Event anyway. Since it was a Rookie contest our Pros Silli and Grumser were there to coach and couldnt use the park once the contest started. We hung out outside where our Rome Test Center was build up and later watched closely what the locals that were used to the skidome conditions managed to show!

Rome crew

After a long day and some good food we decided to get a few kilometers behind us that night and to go a local Snowboard Movie Teaser Party in Stuttgart. So we got some food and hopped into our cars again!

The Rome feat. Voelkl Tour Crew

The party turned out to be pretty good. Except for the fact that we met more of the same faces we see at Austrian and Bavarian Premieres than we thought!

So after getting ready for the party with our little car party listening to good old classic hits (which grew up to 10 passangers before we went back into the club) we enjoyed the rest of the evening! some of the stories that happened that night you’ll read in the one or the other snowboard gossip section soon! hahaha

car party after the first people joining us

The next day I definitely was not awake enough to drive and am Silli very thankful for taking over after an hour! Although everybody said that this trip was just an experience and they prefer the real mountains and don’t plan on going back any time soon I bet some of them will. When there’s no snow to be found it’s definitely better than not going snowboarding at all! :-)

thanks Florian (our northern germany rome rep) for hosting us, thanks Pinho (the park shaper) for hosting the other half of us,  thanks to the Innsbrooklyns for making the trip that funny and thanks to everybody who managed to read this way too long blog! hehe!

Hey out there in internet land. I’ll start this here post with an apology for my legions of blog reading fans out there. I was pretty boring last week, and thats why i didn’t post up and goodies. It also had something to do with the aftermath of this.

Once the fog cleared, I started flipping through the pile of old sketchbooks i’ve filled over the  past 4+ years here at Rome. There are close to 8 of them. These arent you ‘oh look at me i’m so artsy‘ type of sketchbooks. No, these are just some plain old spiral bound books, 8.5×11 sized with some good heavyweight paper. Utilitarian.

Anyway, I’m the one responsible for the look of the Artifact graphics over the years. The first year was done as a freelance job with my friend and sometime collaborator Sean Carmody.  That was for the 05 season, and it was done as full size collages, using all the resources our full time and freelance design studios had to offer after hours. I’m pretty stoked to still have this art sitting in my house - it was the first board graphic I ever worked on, and it laid the ground work for bigger things to come.

After that, i came on to work full time here at Rome, and have done every Artifact since. Here are some scans from my catalog of sketchbooks on the early stages of each of the years board art.

05/06 Season. These sketches laid the groundwork for the infamous Shocker graphic, and the birth of the Really Inappropriate LE graphic.

06/07 Season. The ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ theme started with this single page sketch, and evolved itself into snowboards you rode around on. Crazy.

07/08 Season. This slightly inappropriate sketch became the ‘Hustlin’ series of Artifacts. Although a bit too much for the general public, this original idea was reborn on the Limited Shop Kid graphic. 

08/09 Season. In stores, and on magazine covers now, the ‘Live Nude Girls’ graphic is one of my favorites. For those of you that work in a shop, there will be another Limited Shop Kid version of this as well. Good luck getting your hands on one of those!

09/10 Season. I cant give away much, but i can say that the future of the Artifact is VIOLENT!

The moral of this story is this: Keep those sketch books filling kids. You computer is just a tool, just like your pen. Just because you have illustrator on your computer, it doesn’t make you a designer. Do your homework - the more you research, sketch, rework, research more and start over, the better your final product will be.

Ali and I were in Boston this weekend for the No Correct Way premier. A lot of old friends came out and it was great seeing everyone. Needless to say, a steller time was had by all.

We stayed in Arlington at a friends house Sunday night and spent all day Monday walking around Boston.

First stop was LAB 

The store was amazing, super smart interior design and some great gear, we could have blown multiple paychecks but made it out with Buster’s inheritance mostly intact. One of the owners, Kim helped us out with directions to the rest of the shops we wanted to see and we were off. 

I have to add, the rest of you “to cool for school” retail shops need to take some ques from these guys. If you don’t like people, don’t work retail.

It was a perfect day to walk around, so we continued on into Harvard square where I picked up the Frank Kozik book.  Boston is a spread out city so we did some driving and ended up downtown.

Bodega was the final stop and a real treat, everyone was super friendly and the store is amazing. A big “Fuck You” to Target for ripping off their great idea with its shitty ass, stupid imitation.

We headed out later then we wanted and got home much later then we hoped, it was worth it.

Thanks Todd and Kim for the amazing hospitality.

My old friend Jan and his brother Urs just got back from a diplomatic shred mission in Argentina.

Here is what they had to Say:

“The Mountain we went to was Cerro Cathedral. They didn’t have much in the way of technology, ie fast/safe lifts, snowblowers, explosives for avi control or beacons for that matter…..  Because of this we would get pounded with fresh and the mountain would take forever to fully open. ”

 

 

“The lower Mountain was better (not good, but better) at getting open after a big dump and had some fun trees, small features and runs that almost always ended in bamboo, which is a little trickier than the shrubs we are used to dealing with here in Steamboat.”

“They did have some sick terrain and an ass load of snow while we where there. At one point we got 3 meters in 48 hours, that’s nine fuckin feet!”

“Upper mountain was all above tree line and had everything from open bowls to 50 meter long 1 meter wide hairball chutes and if you want to jump off cliffs there was no shortage of big or small cliff lines”

“The town we stayed in was Bariloche, the biggest ski town I’ve ever seen, the population was something like 3 million. It’s hard to find anything open from about 4-7pm (siesta), the locals have dinner around 10 or 11 and pre game until 2am, and thats when everyone comes out. The main drag has a row of six night clubs 4 stories tall and they don’t close until after the mountain opens.”

Sounds like a pretty sweet trip, Im jealous!

Thanks Jan and Urs

I’m gonna steal some of Cavan’s thunder and do a little “team” post here…

Rome has a mini-ramp and between interviews & premieres, Eiki, Bjorn and LNP have been sessioning it regularly.  Now you may have seen the mini in the catalog…it’s nothing special (but it is our nothing special).

So you can imagine Eiki & LNP were psyched to go ride a real mini-ramp sheltered from the elements up in Stowe.  Jeff (who works with our shops), Cavan & Marie were also out skating.  Thanks to Danger and the Keene’s.

As the title implies…this is all on a camera phone so sorry ’bout the quality.

Eiki

Also…check out this real gem of Eiki’s skating…

LNP

So those guys are on to the Boston premiere. Make sure if you live any where in New England that you are there.

The reason this post wasn’t called “Eiki & LNP skating” is because while I was retrieving these from my phone I found some more stuff I thought you would enjoy…

Jorge

Tuckerman’s (this past Spring)

Back at the Truck

Probably my best day last year...Super cold so the snow was dry and no one was out...