New Ski Design for Spruce Mountain Skiboards, LLC

Spruce Mountain Skiboards, LLC

Spruce Mountain Skiboards is a small design and manufacturing company based in New Hampshire, U.S.A. Our skiboards are short snow skis that turn easily and yet are completely stable at high speeds. We are currently in need of a new graphic design for our 120cm skiboard. We sell through retail dealers on the Internet such as http://www.skiboardsonline.com that specialize in skiboards. Our products have been sold world-wide for the past eight seasons and have a reputation as being one of the best-performing skiboards on the market.

Target Audience

This design contest is for a new graphic for our 120cm length skiboard which we have been selling for the past five years. The typical person that buys and rides these skiboards is 30 to 65 years old and can range from first-timers on skis to people with many years of skiing experience. Many of our customers ride only on this product, and almost all ride only on skiboards.

Design Requirements

The topsheet graphic (top side of the skiboard) can be different on each ski (left and right). Text should not extend from one board to the other, however. The graphic on the top of each board should be right-side-up from tip to tail. (No mirror imaging.)

Because the demographic for this product is generally mature, we are looking for a fairly conservative design that wears well over time. Shock value in the graphics is not required, nor are design elements usually thought of as appealing to a younger demographic desired. Please, no bombs, guns, violence, naked babes, skeletons or skulls. Trees seem to be a popular theme in ski graphics, but at this point are somewhat overworked as are the take-offs on the Japanese rising sun. Examples of the range of good current skiboard graphic design can be seen here even though a few of the designs don't meet all the criteria of this contest: http://www.skiboardsonline.com/Merc…=skiboards

Skiboard graphics tend to avoid emphasizing the length of the board unlike many Alpine ski graphics. The brand for this design is "Spruce" and the model name is "120". The brand name design should go only on the bottom of the boards in two colors and run lengthwise on the board. It should be the same on both boards. An example on one of the Revel8 brand boards is here: http://www.skiboardsonline.com/Merc…rvl8_emp06

The model name "120" shouldn't be overly prominent in the topsheet graphic. It can be somewhat integrated into the graphic as it is in the Revel8 "Condor" model here: http://www.skiboardsonline.com/Merc…_large.jpg

Requirements for colors are that they stay interesting to the customer over time. If customers are excited when they first see the graphic design, that's good, but if they are then tired of them after two months, that's not good.

We require Adobe Photoshop files for the topsheet graphic and Adobe Illustrator for the base graphic.

The three graphic designs, (two topsheet and one base) should each fill a rectangle 125cm long by 15cm wide. During manufacture, the graphics may be misaligned to one side or another or toward one end or another by as much as 0.7cm, so the designs will always bleed off around the edges of the skiboards and should not have critical design elements close to the edges.

Our website is: http://www.spruceski.com

A dimensioned drawing of the skiboard has been provided.

This contest is blind as it's the first we've run at 99designs. We will post additions to the design brief as they become necessary.