Surf stickers inspired me as a kid
I lived in Switzerland for a few months in the mid-90s. It was a beautiful place, but my German was too lousy to consider staying there. One thing I took with me was the wonderful design of pretty much everything. In fact, the moment I decided to become a designer was when I first saw the logo of the SBB, the Swiss railway system.
It’s a simple, recognizable, gorgeous, clever piece of what I by then understood was some sort of art. Our parents had always encouraged us to paint, and the day I saw this on some wall in Lenzburg, I realized I wanted to paint like that.
I drew surf brand logos pretty compulsively when I was a kid, like 6th grade. I actually stole stickers that hung from t-shirts for sale at Pacific Sun and Sun Diego (before Quicksilver was ROXY and all of that nonsense, we’re talking like what 1991 or something) so that I could copy the logos, even the hard ones like Body Glove. My favorites were Rusty and the Gotcha shark dude. Oh man I just remembered Stüssy. That one, too. And then of course I moved onto metal band logos in junior high.
I am a designer now but for whatever reason, I am a terrible at logos.