The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - The industrial design future of snowboarding according to Behance

Behance.net is an internet place that arty folks congregate to show off their wares. Amongst the mass of creativity are some industrial designers having a crack at improving snowboarding. Some of the ideas they've come up with are really interesting, others...not so much...

The 10 Most Bonkers Snowboard Inventions Ever Patented

It's said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. For some people all they have is perspiration. Today we celebrate the efforts of these incredibly moist and flagrant folks...

Legends of the Fallen II - Stickers of the Lost Snowboard Brands

A while ago we created a bunch of stickers for pioneering snowboard brands that had gone the way of the step-in. Seeing as those stickers have been selling like things that occasionally sell, we thought it would be time to produce some more. Keep an eye out for a strangely forgotten key moment in the history of snowboarding...

Is Louie Vito a Dwarf? And some other things we learned from Google Instant

A few years back Google Instant was launched, the feature that tries to anticipate what you're trying to search for while you type. When it launched the Google marketeers promoted it with three key benefits; faster searches, smarter predictions and instant results. What they didn't mention is that it also has some downsides; 1. if you write a blog called Illicit Snowboarding you'll spend the next few years being exposed to some of the most heinous shit on the internet every time you start searching for the site, and 2. it consistently feeds you unwanted insights into the squalid mind of the internet. This week we used Google Instant to find the questions that the internet is asking about snowboarding and here's what we learned...

Bringing Sexy Back – What we can learn from vintage snowmobile fashion

I was just reading the last magazine of the season from those part-timers at Whitelines and in it there was an article by Chris Moran about the current state of snowboarding fashion. At the end he asked; “If anyone has any ideas as to how to make snowboarding irresistibly sexy again, please write”. Well Chris, funnily enough, we have the answer…

Snowboarding is not a spectator sport, but it could be?

A few weeks ago I went out to the Burton European Open and somehow managed to avoid mentioning the actual competition in any of the coverage. I didn't do that purely because I'm a contrary git; when I agreed to go on the trip I fully intended to find some way of writing something interesting about it, but I just couldn't find any angle. I didn't just struggle to find something to write, I struggled to even have the patience to watch the event, and judging by the coverage of the bloggers that went to the US Open last week I'm not the only one to hit this problem. The main thing my trip confirmed is that snowboarding is a horrible sport for spectators. In fact along with the day I once wasted at a cricket match and some hours spent watching my life tick past at a major league baseball game, attending the BEO is now in my top three worst spectator experiences of all time...

Classic Snowboards - The Snurfer Era

After all the excitement of recent weeks and the sudden proliferation of posts, we're finally back to our more sedate weeklyish article rate. This week to simulate your eyes I've arted a pretty poster depicting some of the very first snowboards; a time when snowboards still weren't called snowboards and when they were so savage they all had to be controlled by leash....

Nokia Giveaway Caption Comp

Nokia gave me a phone for the Burton European Open coverage and now it's time to give it away. I promised to do this before I got the phone and after a few days of playing with it I'm regretting that decision, but my mistake is someone else's gain...

Nokia X Burton & The Dangers of Democracy

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned an art competition Nokia and Burton are running. That competition is now at the public voting stage so we decided to see how things were progressing. There was good news, bad news and sphincter-looseningly-terrifying news. The good news is that 391 people entered into the competition, the bad news is that I had to wade through 391 entries to write this article, and the sphincter-looseningly-terrifying news is that now it has come to the public vote some of the most intense crap we've ever seen is somehow winning the vote. Democracy is taking one hell of a beating, and it needs your help...

The Burton European Open 2013 - All the really important bits from days 1-4

I've been here since Sunday getting into the spirit of this event. It's the first time I've gone out of my way to go to one of these competitions. Here's what I've found so far...