If you grew up skating in the late 80s or 90s, your visual references probably look like mine: skulls, punk, complex illustration, the Powell Peralta era. That imagery is part of me and I love it. But I also studied graphic design: grid systems, Swiss typography, rigorous rational work that communicates without shouting. For a long time those two worlds lived in completely separate compartments in my head. A dyslexia I didn’t know how to resolve.
When I stopped skating I missed something without knowing it. The late 90s and early 2000s were the moment skate graphics got closest to what I was studying. The Girl era. Chocolate. Habitat. Alien Workshop. Flat color and clean type that didn’t need a skull to say something. That missed window always bothered me.
Otl Aicher Skates Bauhaus is the print where the AHA moment happened. Where I stopped trying to resolve the dyslexia and started using it. Where I understood that the space between Powell and Swiss design is not empty — it’s exactly where Nosebonk lives.
It all started with a color palette
Otl Aicher is a graphic design icon for his identity work for the Munich 1972 Olympics. Not just a logo — a system. A mathematical grid where every sport followed the same geometric rules. I started wondering: what if skateboarding had been an Olympic discipline back then? What would an Aicher pictogram for skating look like?
[IMAGE: Otl Aicher Munich 1972 pictogram system] Otl Aicher, Olympic pictogram system, Munich 1972. → Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin: bauhaus.de
I spent a good while just playing with colors. No figures yet. Aicher’s flat color masses are deceptive — only certain combinations work when you place flat color against flat color. When I started working with the gesture of the skater, I knew I wanted to represent one specific act: pushing. Rational geometry meeting the freedom of just moving. No destination, no judges, no points.
That tension is the print: the most rigid design system in history representing the freest act in skateboarding.
Where the figure comes from
While researching I passed through the EXIT icon designed by Japanese designer Yukio Ota in 1979 — a symbol stripped of all noise, now an international ISO standard. A figure built from the same geometric vocabulary as Aicher: because that vocabulary works across any language, any culture, without a single word.
[IMAGE: Yukio Ota emergency exit pictogram technical diagram] Yukio Ota, emergency exit pictogram technical diagram, 1979. ISO 7010 international standard.
That led me to the famous “Bauhaus Running Man” you see in hundreds of poster shops sold as a 1923 original. It isn’t. No museum holds it. It’s a modern pastiche inspired by the visual language of the school — anonymous, collective, built from a hundred years of the same vocabulary being passed around and reinterpreted. Exactly like skateboarding.
The real historical source behind that visual language is Oskar Schlemmer. Master of the theatre workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar. His Triadic Ballet (1922) transformed the human body into geometric sculpture — cylinders, spheres, rectangles. He called it Kunstfigur: the art figure. The body reduced to its essential movement, freed from anatomy. A hundred years before skate graphics, he was already doing what the best skate graphics do: finding the geometry inside the motion.
[IMAGE: Oskar Schlemmer Triadic Ballet costume figure] Oskar Schlemmer, Triadic Ballet costume figure, 1922. → MoMA New York: moma.org/collection/works/60691
My figure stands on all of this. Aicher’s grid. Schlemmer’s geometric body. Ota’s universal language. And a skater pushing through Munich colors on a Saturday in Madrid.
Nobody invents anything alone. Showing the sources is part of the work — the same way you teach a trick by saying who you learned it from.
One personal detail
My wife — who I love completely and who somehow tolerates living with a forty-something skater with a graphic obsession — would never hang an old school skull on our living room wall. No matter how much I love those graphics.
But she’d hang this.
That’s not a small thing. It means the work crossed a line. Skate graphics that don’t announce themselves as skate graphics until you look closely. Simple but elegant — a way to take skateboarding into the living room, the office, anywhere. Without asking permission.
An act of rebellion inside simplicity.
You can find the print on the Nosebonk website. If you want to go deeper into this vision, we’re also featured in Skate & Art (Lannoo Books, 2024).
→ See the print → Read more in the magazine
Erik Ziegler is the founder of Nosebonk Skateboarding. He skates and makes graphics in Madrid.