You’re pretty good at skating! Y’know - for a girl.

Skateboarding, much like many other spaces that work towards balancing inequality
and making spaces for women, non-binary folks, LGBTQ2A+, and other marginalized groups. Unfortunately, a lack of research and dialogue with members of the communities, many companies often miss the mark by a wide margin, which often leads to resentment and frustration.

A quick search for “women's skateboards” will often revel skate decks that are often pink, sparkly, cutesy, and features butterflies, ponies, rainbows,  and, for reasons unknown, nude sexualized women. It’s really not a mystery to see why the pinkwashing marketing strategy often fails. If anything, it feels ‘disingenuous’, ‘inauthentic’, ‘cheap ’ or ‘tokenizing’.

For Wheels of Fortune, our marketing team consisted of women and LGBTQ members who were involved in skateboarding in their own way. We know the skateboarding community is made up of a mosaic of different people, all of whom want to see themselves represented in an authentic, real way. So when it came to conceptualizing the imagery for the worlds largest annual skate contest for women and LGTBQ folk, the question became: how can we make everyone feel genuinely represented?

To try and create something that represents everyone, I start my process is researching and looking up inspiration, especially from skate culture. Brands like Toy Machine, Santa Cruz, and Powell Peralta are considered some of the largest influencer with artwork within skateboarding.
A lot of what you'd see would be monsters and creatures in absurd situations. One commonality between the artwork was that there are no distinctive physical identifiers. There's no way to know the gender, sex, race, ability, or status. It makes it easy to relate to and doesn't exclude anyone from enjoying it.

 Something that anyone attending Wheels of Fortune can enjoy? Something that doesn't bar someone from seeing themselves within the artwork itself? All of us are different and unique in this giant mosaic, and yet we share this commonality - our love of this sport. 
Underneath it all, if we pull back the layers, remove everything surrounding it, the bones of it all, is our love of this sport. Which led me to realize how, beneath all of us, everybody has bones. Everybody has a skeleton. It's our own, but it's another thing we all share.