Vision was just everywhere in the late ’80s. The skateboards and Vision Street Wear almost seemed to exist side by side. I don’t think of one without the other.

I wore some of the clothes myself. I had a shirt and pants covered in this crushed-together mix of barbed wire, lettering and spray-painted-looking graphics, and I had a pair of turquoise Vision Street Wear shoes. The big square Vision logo was impossible to miss. Some of the clothing was great and some of it could get a little overdone, but that was part of the period too. Skateboarders wanted to look like skateboarders, and Vision gave you a very obvious way to do that.

The shoes were also trying to solve real skating problems. We constantly wore holes through the toes and the ollie area and patched them with duct tape. Vision reinforced those spots with rubber. I remember thinking the front of the shoe looked kind of clunky, almost like the side of a trash can, but I wore them anyway.

The boards could be just as loud and strange. Vision had some really unusual shapes — big noses, hips, blunt ends and odd outlines. The Grigley boards were interesting, Johnee Kop’s 1989 Alien was completely wild, and Marty Jimenez had some great comic-book-like graphics. Even the older Vision pigs could get strange with all the different prints and finishes.

The Psycho Stick was one of those boards that seemed to be everywhere too. It had a good shape, but for whatever reason, in the scene around me it picked up a little bit of a poser reputation. That may not have been fair, but that is how I remember it.

I personally rode one Vision deck, a full-size Ken Park on a dark blue stain. My memories of that board are oddly vague compared with some of the others I owned, but I remember liking the way it felt. I was choosing boards largely by what worked under my feet, and I think the fuller shape and larger nose fit the ramp skating I was moving toward.

Then there was the Double Vision. My friend Rick showed up at my half-pipe with one in 1989, and it looked bizarre. Both ends looked more like tails than a nose and tail, and the whole thing still had the bulky proportions of an ’80s deck. It looked almost like two kicktails had been joined together into one big plank. I didn’t want one, but it was fascinating to watch him ride it back and forth on the ramp. It seemed gimmicky, but there was clearly an idea there that skateboarding had not completely caught up with yet.

And then there was Mark Gonzales. It is hard for me to think about Vision without thinking about him, even though I never liked the face graphic very much when it was new. It just didn’t appeal to me visually. I was much more attracted to some of the stranger graphics Vision was doing. Years later, of course, I came to appreciate what those early Gonz boards represented, and I’m very happy to have a beautiful example now. My taste at the time and what later became historically important were not always the same thing.

Vision was commercial and extremely popular, but I don’t remember that automatically making it feel illegitimate. Skateboarding was getting bigger, and most of us were excited that it was getting out there. Vision had enough serious riders and enough genuinely strange ideas to back up all the branding.

Looking back, that combination is probably what defines Vision for me: huge visibility, fashion, odd graphics, experimental shapes and ideas that sometimes looked awkward before the rest of skateboarding caught up with them.