Skip to Main Content
Snowboard graphics matter because it’s storytelling in a single image that elevates a customer’s life in two ways. First, you get to own a piece of art and engineering. Second, you get to ride that piece of art and engineering down a snowy hill using gravity while participating in the most fun thing on planet Earth.
Dave Banks
Graphic Designer
Dave Banks clearly remembers the skateboard graphics he was obsessed with as a kid. It was the 1980s and his older brother and his friends were into boards from Powell Peralta and Blind. “I was mesmerized by the boar graphics,” Banks says. “I got my first skateboard when I was 9 years old. It really set me on a course. It’s all I wanted to do.” He built ramps and quarter pipes in his friends’ driveways while growing up on the South Shore of Massachusetts and in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. When he was 12, Banks’ brother dared him to take a snowboard lesson while on a family ski trip in Vermont and he found his next obsession. “I ended up subscribing to every snowboard magazine and collecting every consumer catalog I could at all my local shops,” he says.

While spectating at the U.S. Open in Stratton, Vermont, in 1994 with his family, Banks felt like he’d arrived at the holy grail of snowboarding. He walked into the Burton demo tent and asked who created Burton’s board graphics. The answer? A design firm that at the time was called JDK. “At that exact moment I told myself, ‘I have to work there. There are no other options in my mind,’” says Banks. With that, his course was set. He studied graphic design at the Maine College of Art and landed the internship of his dreams at JDK. “Seeing the amount of talent and style in each department had an enormous effect on me,” he says. After that, Burton hired him to work as a T-shirt graphics designer.

Banks later moved to San Francisco and then Portland, Oregon, and launched his own freelance graphics studio that he called Venom Thunder. “I wanted to come up with a studio name that sounded like a band name,” Banks says. “I’ve never pursued playing a musical instrument seriously, but I always wanted to be in a band. Music has been a giant influence and obsession my whole life.” Over the years, he contributed apparel graphics for brands like Old Navy, The North Face, Marmot, Salomon, Bonfire, Nike SB, Nike Snowboarding, and Adidas Skateboarding. 

In 2015, Banks joined the staff at Ride Snowboards as the brand’s global senior graphic designer. His graphics, he says, are strongly influenced by heavy metal music and horror, sci-fi, and fantasy movies. “The best part of my job is getting to put the visual ideas that keep me up at night on a platform I love and have been obsessed with since I was 12 years old,” he says.

To check out more of Dave’s personal work, find him on Instagram @robinbankz
Shop Ride Snowboards
See All Ride Snowboards