Welcome to Infectious. We're sure looking forward to having you around.

Join in our skate deck design challenge! From now until June 24th we're hosting a contest to find the first five skate decks that get introduced into the Infectious catalog. After the contest ends you can submit your art into the general Open Submission contest. You're welcome to comp it onto a deck, mock-up as one of the other products we design or simply upload a jpeg of your art.

The skate decks are made the same way they used to be - they're made out of North American maple by Penn Woods and they are printed the traditional way via a full color proprietary digital heat transfer process. No vinyl involved with the decks.

Yup, but again it's totally hassle-free. When you submit your art for the first time, there will be a checkbox that you have to tick when you upload it to the site. You can read the license agreement here. There's some legal mumbo jumbo in there, so to summarize in plain English: we don't own your Design. We only license your Design for making Infectious Products. If we don't use your Design, you retain all rights to it. If we use your Design for an Infectious Product, and then we stop selling those Infectious Products for six months, we release our exclusive rights. We pay royalties on all Infectious Products that we sell that use your Design.

We're gonna sell them! We'll be launching them into the catalog after the skate deck design challenge finishes.

We'd love to work with you to make that happen on some of the designs. We figure more royalties will be welcome for you guys, but let us know either way: designs (at) infectious.com.

Yup. We'll keep it open for a while so that you can grab anything you want off the site, but in a couple of months time the site, including forums and the gallery of designs that didn't win and their scores will disappear.

Absolutely, you're welcome to submit any previous designs that didn't win at Popdeck to the Infectious skate deck challenge. We encourage you to just submit your best designs, so that the contest doesn't get too overwhelmed.

We are slightly different from Popdeck and we do edit the entries that come into Open Submissions to try and keep the quality in the voting gallery high.

No, we're not that hungry.... just eating Popdeck.

No, Adam and Parker are focusing their energies on Deckpeck.

The prices will be similar, in the $40 - $50 range.

Yes, indeed. We've paying attention to the Popdeck forums and we've read a few disgruntled posts about low prize money. For our first contest the first prize will be $1000 cold hard cash + 5% net sales + $100 worth of Infectious product. The four runners up will receive 5% net sales + $100 worth of Infectious product. We're still figuring out the best compensation model, so this may change over time.

They're going down to 5% as this is a sustainable business model for us to make sure we thrive and prosper and can give you royalties for many years to come. We appreciate that this is less than Popdeck, so we're raising the top prize money to a recession-friendly $1000 to compensate.

Please feel free to submit the design, however if it wins, you will be required to remove it from Deckpeck (or any other site) for it to be sold on Infectious.

We just designed a brand new forum feature (http://www.infectious.com/forums/talk) because we knew you guys were coming. We appreciate that at Popdeck questions posted to the forum didn't always get the swiftest response. Know that the whole team is here and ready and raring to help make this process as smooth as possible for you guys.

Coming soon in Summer 2009. We'll keep you all updated via the forums.