Donald Brink embraces the weird, and we’re all better for it. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Donald Brink is an exceedingly interesting man. That’s why Vissla, a brand supporting all things interesting and weird, sat him down for the seventh installment of From the Shed, a new series that dives into the Vissla Creator & Innovator crew and the favorite boards in their personal quivers.
“Episode 07 features Donald Brink, a globally renowned shaper known for pushing surfboard design into new and unexpected territory,” Vissla wrote. “Filmed during the annual Creators Gathering, this episode captures Donald breaking down some of his most experimental surfboard shapes, each rooted in its own hydrodynamic theory.”
Brink is the kind of guy who likes to understand how things work. He’s a person who likes to pull things apart to find out what’s going on to make them do what they do, and when that’s paired with a serious artistic flair and a love of surfing, you get some very weird things. And Donald Brink embraces the weirdness.
A few years ago, we sat down with Brink for a series we called Creators. We had a great time poking and prodding at his brain to see what makes him tick. We found out that he was frustrated with how regular (so-called) surfboards performed when the conditions weren’t perfect, so he began to try his hand at shaping strange, assymetrical shapes. They were all one-0f-a-kind, designed with specific surfers’ needs in mind. A little less volume in a rail here, a little more fin there.
“His non-traditional designs know no limits,” The Inertia wrote. “But often, traditions are meant to be broken.”
And that’s exactly what Brink is doing.
