If you don’t know about the competition:

THE PROJECT THAT HELPS SOCIAL COMMUNICATION.

If you ask most people, they’ll say that advertising, and the communications industry as a whole, sells people things they don’t need and can’t afford. It might be occasionally entertaining, but by and large it’s fundamentally wrong and unnecessary.

As we work in it, we’d prefer to focus on the positive side. The communications industry is also the best in the world at grabbing people’s attention and getting them to act on what we say.

The aim of Good 50×70 is to use these skills to highlight more important things than beer and trainers. It’s a competition to raise awareness amongst the creative community of the power we have to be a force for good.

There are 7 briefs from 7 charities on 7 issues that affect thousands of people around the world. All you have to do is pick a topic that inspires you and submit a poster on that theme. 210 posters (30 from each brief) will be selected by our jury of leading designers and exhibited around the world and published in a catalogue,but more importantly they’ll be presented to the charities for their use as a potential campaign.

Even if you create communication tools every day, this time your poster might really have a positive impact on thousands of lives.

It’s time for our industry to give us something back.

Check Transworld Business for the whole story.

If you surf, own a bong and a DVD player, it’s a pretty entertaining 90 minutes. It’s cheesier than you can even imagine, the writing, directing, production, storyline and acting are all horrible beyond belief, but… that’s what makes it so great!

You can see the trailer here, and there’s a few clips on youtube here, here, and if you want to see my favorite scene (which is the end, so don’t watch it if you want to be surprised) click here.

SYNOPSIS

Seventeen-year old Robbie Zirpollo (Randy Wayne) has a problem. As our story opens, his mother Connie (Lindsay Wagner) is driving him to his new summer job. We learn that Robbie has grown up in Oceanside, California, but now he and his mother have moved to Colorado for a fresh start, as his father has taken the family’s savings and his secretary to Mexico. Robbie’s mom has, through an uncle, gotten him a summer job at Water World on the grounds crew.

On his first day on the job, standing in line to get his uniform, Robbie meets Alex (Ben Ziff), a concessions worker who works for Aokee (Gabriel Iglesias), the manager of “Aokee’s Surf and Snack Shack.” Walking to the front of the line demanding (quietly but firmly) her uniform is Tiffany (Cerina Vincent), the daughter of park owner Mike “Big Mike” Maxwell (Denis Berkfeldt). She is a drop-dead gorgeous girl, and as the owner’s daughter, does pretty much what she wants. Robbie is stunned by her…

He’s a total kook.

He can’t surf for shit, he paddles like a beginner (on his chest too much), and when he stands up it’s a really silly looking squat. And his teeth are way too white.

He’s really vocal when he paddles for the wave, saying stuff out-loud like “Yeah…come on…yeah….come on…here we go…lets go baby…” It’s pretty funny.

But, the thing is, the guy was totally stoked! He was super-friendly, outgoing and talkative (a bit too much), smiling the whole time, cheering on his friends, and honestly looked like he was having more fun than anyone else.

He also didn’t really get in the way much at all, and he didn’t do the accidental snake like most beginners do. I didn’t see him even really go for waves that other people were paddling for.

So overall, I’d say he surfs like any other beginner jock from Texas, but more stoked and with better etiquette. And abs.

These are the new Slater/Merricks designed by Emil Kozak, Thomas Campbell designed a graphic for Dane Reynolds, and we’ve already seen what Super Surfboards is doing with their graphics.

I’m having mixed feelings about it. While I think they’re looking pretty cool, and the artwork is great, I definitely feel like it makes the boards look “cheap”. You totally lose the hand-crafted feeling, and it seems to turn the board itself into something that’s not so special.

If you went to a party and 63 other guys had on the same exact dress as you, it makes your dress seem a little less special. So why would it be any different to paddle out at Rincon and have 63 (of the 400 or so) other people are riding the same exact looking board as you? Does that make your $750 board feel less special to you? It seems like it would.

Here’s what it says on the Channel Islands site about the process:

“Recently you may have noticed many of our team riders have been experimenting with graphic art on their surfboards. This is a collaborative project with HP (Hewlett Packard) in which we directly print an art piece (that has been designed for them by one of their favorite artists) on the fiberglass. It is then layed on the board and the glassing process continues like normal. This eliminates the need for big laminates which soak up resin or heavy paints which ad weight. Both Dane Reynolds and Kelly Slater have been working with artists and have come up with some really cool stuff. Cost is $60 per side / allow 8 weeks for production.”

I mean hopefully where this is going is that you will be able to create your own custom graphics and give them an Illustrator file to use. Then your board will feel completely custom, which would be AWESOME! But if it’s just like the skate/snow industry, and all the graphics are mass-produced, I’m not so sure.

So what do you guys think? Do you like it? Would you spend the extra $120? Do you think it kills the “organic” (artistically, not environmentally) feel of a board? Does that matter at all, or do you just care about ripping?

Let me know.

Click-thru for a few more pics

Stay tuned…