Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1175260
98 native to the North Shore, chances good that Andrew Bablo has influenced the can's design or his art has graced a wall at the brewery to make your tasting experience more colorful. Pretty much everything Bablo touches, with his particular aes- thetic and marketing savvy, turns to gold. He spun his senior thesis project at Montserrat College of Art into the international niche magazine Steez, about skateboard and snowboard culture, which published quarterly for nearly a decade. This led to a lifestyle of traveling to Los Angeles to meet with advertisers like Vans shoes, hanging out with professional snowboarders, doing celebrity interviews with public figures like of literary god Dave Eggers, and featuring in his very own magazine DJ Jazzy Jeff and Wu-Tang Clan. "It was like a big party scene," says Bablo, as he shows me around his Beverly studio. "You had artists, bands, these concepts and ideas, and you got a real feel for what this demographic is into. And there I was, just a designer, meeting with these big companies at 23 years old." Bablo had subscribers and a print run of more than 20,000 copies per issue. He had freelancers covering everything from EDM (electronic dance music) in Los Angeles to metal concerts on the East Coast. It was like 156 pages of pure love poem to bro culture and to the cool ladies who fit into the culture. All 35 of the thick, weighty issues of Steez magazine took up to 50 staffers and freelanc- ers to produce and were distributed in all 50 states and Canada, with limited distribution in Japan, Korea, and some parts of Europe. Then, Steeze became a sought after sports ap- parel brand. Today, still at just 33 years old, Bablo is in- spiring and in possession of an enviable career. He calls himself a "risk taker," which seems an understatement. He seems to view himself and the art world with the right amount of light-heartedness. He's an artist with a big career that he manages by taking on projects that challenge him, and he is booked months in advance for logos, murals, signage, and packaging. He will design a coffee table, a beer tap handle or the entire concept of the new restaurant you're opening. His look is big, bold, and full of swirling color with the industrial Andrew Bablo has created serveral pieces of branding and artwork for local businesses including Bent Water Brewing Cpmany, Kokeshi, and Finz. I F YO U ' V E S A M P L E D A N Y B E E R PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF ANDREW BABLO