The Art Of Design’s Piece Of Powerboat History

I’ve had the good fortune of writing hundreds of feature articles throughout my career; some home runs, some swings and misses—yes I’m a baseball fan so excuse the analogies. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I think the one that was part of the latest Speed On The Water digital magazine that went live yesterday (download it here) has a place in my top 10 most memorable stories.

taod mamba sotw

Mamba, a 51 GTX from Outerlimits originally built for Mike Stevenson, is one of the most unique paintjobs Dean Loucks and The Art Of Design ever did. Photo courtesy The Art Of Design

That’s not to say it’s my best work—it can’t be since the story on The Art Of Design’s 30 coolest performance boat paintjobs is primarily owner Dean Loucks’ words in an edited format—but it was a story I won’t forget mainly because I learned a lot about the talented artist and the business he started three decades ago.

Between emails, texts, several hours of phone conversations, as well as collecting images, organizing the content and laying out the story across 10 pages of the digital issue, creating the story from start to finish spanned several weeks and took at least a couple of days worth of time to produce. When we discussed the idea of featuring many of TAOD’s best paintjobs of all time, narrowing down the list to 30 boats, a nice round figure to represent his time in the industry, was challenging.

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