ay back in the late ’80s and very early ’90s there were only two brands of skate shoes, Vans and Airwalk. Jaimie Muehlhausen was right there in the mix with Airwalk. In fact, it was his first real graphic design job. He was getting a bit sick of his 7-Eleven job as a manager and was more than happy to be doing ads, packaging, logos and shoe graphics rather than cleaning Slurpee machines. His first couple decades of life were spent in Oklahoma, with an all-American background of baseball and muscle cars. He went to Oklahoma State University to play baseball and owned a 1976 Trans Am, “just prior to Smokey and the Bandit... so it was still cool.” He did some more post-secondary at Phil-
lips University, but didn’t finish his degree. Jaimie’s experience has more than made up for any “book learnin’” need in life. After a few years at Airwalk, and a bit of freelance, Jaimie became the art director at Snowboarder magazine. During his stint there, he art directed the first two large-format Skateboarder magazines. When the first dot-com bubble hit in 2000 he jumped ship to Swell.com and its sister/brother snow and skate sites. Jaimie knew Tony Hawk from the days of laying out one of his first Airwalk Pro shoe ads, so when the Internet imploded on itself he helped Tony with some art direction for his first big arena tour. The brand empire of Tony Hawk, Inc.
(THI) was expanding and Jaimie came on-board full-time to help manage the brand and contribute his design and writing skills. His role has many facets that include making sure big ad agencies don’t turn a photo of Tony 180 degrees just to be more extreme. Jaimie’s work on graphics and art is eclectic and diverse. Most recently he’s been doing a great deal of Birdhouse’s art since the brand was brought in-house to THI. His personal take on life is sarcastic and filled with dry humour, which shows in some of the board graphics he’s done. —Randy Laybourne contusion.com
“Jaimie knows the look of action sports better than anyone, and he understands what it takes to work with ‘corporate’ America while staying true to our aesthetics. I trust his judgment implicitly.” —Tony Hawk clockwise from top left:
Birdhouse “Man Face” deck Birdhouse “Stripes” deck Birdhouse “Interlock” deck Birdhouse “Split Logo” deck Birdhouse “Never Was” deck Airwalk “Vic” logo Birdhouse logo “Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers” logo Tony Hawk’s Dissent logo Tony Hawk logo Ride Channel logo “Boom Boom Huck Jam” Happy Meal T-Moblie “Tony Hawk” Sidekick Airwalk Jason Lee ad Poweredge Magazine 1991 cover Skateboarder Magazine 1997 cover
AIRWALK CIRCLE A Jaimie’s iconic Airwalk “Circle A” logo has been in use for over 20 years, which is a few lifetimes for a logo in the skateboard world. Lots of times a design will take weeks of development, focus groups and a bunch of meetings. This logo took Jaimie about a couple seconds of conceptual time and 20 minutes to draw. As he says: “Sometimes design is just gut feelings and obvious solutions.”
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“Vacation” by Jaimie Muehlhausen. Created exclusively for Concrete Skateboarding. 18
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