Thursday, November 27, 2014

Coroflot is a site for budding designers/creatives to publish their portfolios in the hope of attracting a job. There's some good stuff on there and some very strange stuff, so this week we trawled through it to find the 10 most interesting snowboarding projects. Welcome to the future my friends...

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Strange fact: The majority of snowboards are not built by the snowboard brands. That's something most snowboarders aren't aware of and most of the companies keep very quiet about. It's all about as transparent as an internal FIFA inquiry, so we thought we'd try and figure out exactly what's going on and shed some light on it...

Thursday, November 6, 2014

The one thing that's had the largest effect on snowboarding in the last few years has been the rise of the internet. By that, what I mean is the rise of the internet and it's keyboard-mashing hordes has directly effected the word 'snowboard'. Never before has one word been spelled so many different ways by so many different people. Today we take a look at what happens to some of those sad misspelled snowboards after they are launched from Twitter into the unwelcoming abyss of the interweb...

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Some poor intern at Thrasher Magazine has been busy scanning every page of every back issue and uploading it onto the internet. That's an incredible administrative feat from a very unlikely source. Good thing for us though is that we can now see the brief period when skateboarders thought snowboarding was cool. Here are all the interesting appearances of snowboarding in Thrasher...

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

eBay now have a specific section of their site called 'Crazy Ski Hats'. It was our destiny to find out more...

Thursday, October 23, 2014

The most inexplicable brand in snowboarding is back with another questionable product...

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Somewhere within the baffling internet behemoth that is reddit there's a large and active community of snowboarders. We thought we'd find out what the hell was going on so we interviewed one of the 'mods' who goes by the moniker of david_z to find out more...

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Here's a little story about what happens when you build your brand based purely on the objectification of women...

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Now that we've saved Whitelines by taking the time explain to them why print is dead and what they need to do to save themselves, we figured the next thing we should do is critique the very first edition. We thought it might be interesting to see where it all went wrong, but what we found was a strange glimpse into a vaguely remembered part of our past...

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Zoo York are the latest non-snowboard brand to try and break into this market, but unlike the recent successes by Nike and Adidas, Zoo York's efforts are a case study in how it shouldn't be done. This is how you don't learn from experience...

Friday, September 5, 2014

The first Whitelines magazine of the season, the buyers' guide, is out on the shelves now and the quick purchasers amongst you might have noticed that a couple  of the pages have been coloured in by us. Illicit has gone non-clickable. We were tasked with what turned out to be a very tricky job of creating a mildly-amusing infographic. On the face of it that seemed straightforward, until we realised that those two things are mutually exclusive. Still, we forged on and produced the definitive historical guide to snowboarding fashion trends and weirdly enough it turns out that this cheeky chap might just be the most fashionable man in snowboarding...

Thursday, August 21, 2014

This year there's a new British snowboard company on the block called Snow Candy. We interviewed them to try and find out just what the hell was going on...

Thursday, August 14, 2014

After a number of years of reviewing books on this site, I think I'm probably now the world's foremost expert on ski resort based literature. Sit back and bask in my knowledge as I use all that experience to review four more snowboarding books...

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Stock photography is a very strange business, with thousands of photographers around the world trying to eke out a living by trying to anticipate the visual fodder needs of editors or designers. One of the scenarios a numbers of these guys have decided could be the next big requirement is photos of snowboarders in business suits, and some of the results are quite special...

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Swingbo was a classic a-bit-like-a-snowboard-but-not-as-good-as-a-snowboard invention that flared up in Germany in the early 80s before dying a quick and merciful death. Like all modern inventions it was launched with a marketing burst and a promo video, and someone has been nice enough to post it on the YouTube. Here's what we found....

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Before Christmas go we took a look at the most awkward snowboard company ever. Part of what made them so outstanding was their impressively awkward model photo shoot. We wondered if it was actually possible to photograph scantily clad models with snowboards and for it not to be awkward...

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Over the past few years former pro snowboarder and amateur gangster, Marc Frank Montoya, has been re-inventing himself as a "Financial Freedom Specialist". It all sounded amusingly bonkers, but unfortunately underneath his veneer of blag, the ways he's chosen to money off the back of his snowboarding legacy are really sinister...

Thursday, June 12, 2014

At the dawn of the internet, a service called the Internet Archive started diligently recording the history of all websites. This week we use the Internet Archive to explore the early stumblings of snowboarding in the digital age and plunge into a wonderful world of intro screens, black backgrounds, gifs and step-in bindings...

Thursday, May 29, 2014

The Chinese eCommerce group Alibaba is about to go public in what is expected to be the largest tech IPO of all time. 80% of everything sold online in China goes through this company and they flog more merchandise than Amazon and eBay combined. It's not a company most people outside China are familiar with, so we figured we'd take a look and see what all the excitement is about...

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Over a year ago we put together an article looking at what was then a small trickle of professional snowboarders who had taken their kit off for publicity. At that time there were 7 ladies and 5 guys who had given it a try. One of the strange things we noticed around this year's Olympics was that in the space of a few months the total number of female athletes choosing to go down this route has more than doubled with another 8 taking the plunge. What does that mean for snowboarding?...

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Immediately after I posted last week's honest slogans article, Brooke Geery from the YoBeat, dropped me a message to let me know that she'd LOL'd, then she had a stab at predicting the number of people who would read it. Her prediction was eerily spot-on, which means she's clearly some sort of internet witch. It got us wondering how good normal people are at predictions, because although everyone loves making predictions, usually no one bothers to check the results. We figured the best way to check was to see how different people's predictions panned out at the 'Lympics...

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Honest Slogans is a great single-theme Tumblr that imagines what would happen if companies used honest marketing slogans. It got us thinking what might happen to the world of snowboarding...

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

A few weeks ago I reviewed two self-published books, one was great, the other incredibly dull, but as I mentioned I had planned to review three. This week we deal with that third book - Rants From The Mountain by Allan Saro. It's pitched as being a mix of advice for beginner snowboarders/skiers, a behind-the-scenes look at lift operations and the story of Allan Saro's season. That's what was promised, but what was delivered was something entirely different...

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

In 1991, Brett "Cowboy" Kobernik was the first person to saw a snowboard in half, thus inventing the splitboard. Over the following two decades splitboarding slowly become more popular as it moved from the realms of solitary bearded blokes hacking apart snowboards in garages, to being shiny products anyone can buy in shops. The last few years in particular have seen a noticeable surge in the number of splitboards being produced by a whole raft of manufacturers, but we couldn't help noticing that the unique development of splitboarding has left a slightly odd legacy...

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Last week we went snowboarding in Mayrhofen and while we were there we noticed a few strange things...

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The rise of the internet has transformed publishing in the same way that it transformed the music industry. If you fancy becoming a writer these days, you're no longer at the mercy of a few big publishing companies and there's now a raft of ways that you can foist your book upon the world. Just like music too, some of this newly available product is great, but some most of it is absolute crap. We decided to delve into the world of self-published snowboard books by reviewing three of them. Here's what we found...

Thursday, February 20, 2014

So that's the five-ringed circus over for another four years. One of the unexpected highlights for us was the poetic musings Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood when they were let lose on the BBC coverage. To tide you over until it all starts again in Pyeongchang 2018, we've created some cut-out-and-keep memorabilia so you can relive their words of wisdom any time you like...

Monday, February 17, 2014

Yet again, during and after an important snowboarding competition, one of the main things everyone was talking about was the judging. Questioning the judging of a sport isn't a topic unique to snowboarding, but the level and consistency of it is. When we should be talking about the snowboarding itself, we're forced to spend time trying to figure out what's going through the minds of a group of anonymous guys sitting in a little temporary hut. But the problem isn't the judges themselves, the problem is the judging system - The current system is fundamentally flawed and it needs to change...

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Sometimes it's not who you know, it's who you don't want to know...

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Just like our friends at the NSA, the team at Illicit Snowboarding have been tracking and spying on all the world's conversations. Here's the scoop of what we've found people have been talking about at the Sochi Olympics up to this point...

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

I thought I'd have a look around the snowboarder profiles on the Sochi Olympics site and two things struck me; firstly, the website was full of interesting glitches which made this process very tricky (but that seems to be a standard for this Olympics), and secondly, why do all the snowboarders look so damn grumpy?

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

This week we scoured the depths if Imgur to find their best snowboarding posts. Imgur is the photo sharing site beloved of Redditors and the great thing about it is that the photos come with their own comments, so our caption writer was able to take the week off...
 
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