Once upon a time, I fancied myself a skateboarder. I wasn’t very good, but I dedicated over a decade of my life to it and had a blast along the way. With the busyness of work, family, and life in general, I haven’t been able to skate very much. But I like to reminise on the old days and see what’s going on in the world of skateboarding from time to time.

Today was one of those days. I started looking up company websites to see what they were up to. As a designer, I was also looking at the design of the company sites. The design of the different company’s sites varied. Some were pretty lame, with no attention to the design at all, and some were really impressive!

Here’s what I found on my little online journey.

C1RCA

Circa’s website has a nice, minimal dark design. It really allows the content to stand out. The flash content gallery offers up an easy way to brows through loads of content. They obviously have one or a few designers/writers/photographers creating content for the site, keeping it fresh.

Anti–Hero

This is a unique design. Nice non-structured layout with hand-drawn navigation. Another great touch to this site is the scaling background image. Pretty simple site with only links to footage of a featured skater. Overall, a cleaver design.

ZERO

Zero’s site has a nice layout that scales up and down with the browser window. Nice minimal design as well.

Birdhouse

The Birdhouse site is just ok. I think the best part is the header. The home page feels cramped. The typography could be a little better. You’d think an international superstar like Tony Hawk would have a better site!

Zoo–York

Zoo York’s has a nice little flash site. I like the gold elements in the design. They’re product section is laid out pretty well too. A little slow loading though.

Conclusion

Many of the websites I found were’t that great. I am surprised that there weren’t more skateboarding company sites with killer out-of-the-box design. I think there may be an untapped market here!