The blaqbook concept came to me my senior year at Art Institute of Philadelphia. I was into the whole graffiti thing as I’m sure most of you can recall. My black book, which I used for my graffiti sketches, became much more than just a drawing pad. I would write down idea’s for just about all aspects of my life. It got to the point that if I lost my black book I would of failed my senior year of college. If I saw something cool that I didn’t want to forget I would write it down in there. Soon enough it was time for my senior project and I couldn’t think of an idea. One of my teachers asked about the book I would always carry around.
When I explained what it was, she was like well instead of carrying this book around why don’t you just create a site. I was like what a black book site? She was like no your black book site. She explained that it was very interesting from the outside looking in. She read my book for about 45 minutes, just looking around reading stuff here and there. She was like you definitely have something. The rest is history. I used the name blaqbook because when a graffiti writer chooses a name they don’t spell it politically correct. For instance if a graffiti writers name was pronounced “cause” they would spell it “calls”.
It basically gives you your own unique identity. So when someone sees that word they know its you… period. The word blaqbook is ours. Its our identity. It’s our alter ego. But instead of one person sketching images in a book, there’s a group of close individuals scribbling opinions, humor, and articles on things that would interest individuals with the same type of mind set as us.
So blaqbook is pretty much a publication by a bunch of youngsters. We write about stuff that interests people like us. We go to all of these news sources all the time and for the most part we don’t give a fuck about any of the shit their talking about. We don’t take life nearly as serious as them. Sites like viceland.com and hypebeast.com have been hitting us readers with stuff we can actually relate to for quite sometime. We hope to one day fit into the category as these two megasites, granted they clearly kick our asses. I’ve been a dedicated reader of both of these sites for quite some time. I hate that the youth has nothing to do with any of the information being put out there these days. Basically we’re brainwashed daily by middle aged Americans. What the fuck do they know about our lives? Fuck that, lets take that shit back. That’s what it’s all about! If you don’t have a sense of humor take a hike! I guarantee you WILL be offended.
Sincerely as always,
Justin Little
