Thrasher's concrete pillbox of a headquarters sits in a San Francisco industrial park, across from a scrap-metal shop and downwind from a sausage factory. On the walls inside are Black Sabbath posters, an artificial leg and police ordinances against "public skateboarding." Editors can variously be found sprawled over couches or skating through the halls.

The apparent anarchy notwithstanding, the 125,000-circulation monthly continues to gross big money--more than $3 million last year--in a niche that the publishing empires of New York and Los Angeles won't touch: disaffected urban teens who don't do much but eat, sleep and fly around on skateboards.

The reasons for Thrasher's success are many, but ultimately it gets down to attitude: The magazine's crew of twenty- and thirty-something staffers, most of whom are themselves rabid skateboarders, like to push limits--whether on the streets or behind a Macintosh.

Dosland estimates that, altogether, Thrasher's production system "cost less than $50,000, and it is saving us that much every month. The decision to go with desktop is probably what has allowed this company to survive."

Beyond saving money, Thrasher's desktop system has given staffers the means to produce a more visually dynamic magazine. At times, that means tossing the instruction manual and diving in. "When someone tells you something can't be done, don't believe it until you try it," says Dosland, who has studied and taught graphic arts and computer imaging at colleges around the Bay Area.

A self-proclaimed hacker, he's developed a unique Photoshop technique to capture improbable skateboarding tricks. In collaboration with photo editor/photographer Bryce Kanights, Dosland selects a sequence of photos that follow a skater through all the key points of a jump, and merges them onto a common background within a single frame. His first step is to scan the individual negatives on the Leaf and port them into Photoshop. Then, using the application's pen tool, he "cuts out" the skater from each photo and pastes the images into a new Photoshop file.

The result is a strobe-like sequence that captures the illusion of movement. The concept itself isn't new--art directors have performed a similar stunt with scissors and tape--but Dosland does the whole thing electronically, eliminating rough edges and saving time and money. "Part of the beauty of desktop," says the soft-spoken Dosland, "is that you can discover some pretty cool stuff just by playing around with it."

Indeed, Dosland continues to push the technology beyond its putative limits. For instance, many production execs remain hesitant to entrust a cover to a desktop scan because the maximum resolution of most CCD-based desktop scanners (like the Leaf) remains well below that of the high-end drum scanners. But Dosland is fearless. "It's supposed to be a limitation of the scanner. It can't get that big, it can't get that fine," he says. "But really it can. The Leaf is big enough for a full page."

True to Dosland's words, the November Thrasher features the first cover scan produced on the Leaf. He concedes, however, that a desktop scan may not work for magazines with more exacting reproduction standards. "I'm not saying National Geographic should use a Leaf 35," he says, noting that the technology still suffers consistency problems.

For example, November's cover initially showed a definite cyan cast, necessitating recalibration of the scanner and a rescan. Dosland attributes the problem to the optical receptor's tendency to lose sensitivity over time. "The scanners, printers and monitors are consistently inconsistent," says Dosland. Nonetheless, he insists that desktop is more than up to the job for all but the most finicky publications: "Anyone who is just starting out and thinks he has to have some goofy Scitex system and a quarter-million-dollar color proofer just to get off the ground is buying a line of bunk from the high-end industry."

Thrasher's setup puts enormous creative power into the hands of production staffers. And while that's a boon, it also raises the specter of total desktop anarchy. For instance, Dosland used Photoshop to radically alter Thrasher's logo for November's cover. Worried, however, that readers might not recognize the redesigned title on the newsstand, Publisher Kevin Thatcher vetoed it. "Sometimes the guys downstairs go a little crazy," he says. "That's where I have to come in and say, 'Yeah, looks great, now change it back to the way it was.'"

The lesson is that, to get the most from desktop, publishers must find a balance. Doubtless, equilibrium is somewhere between Dosland's assertion that, "The way to go is to give each individual the power he needs and not have everyone indentured to a big master machine," and Thatcher's admonition that, "Before you put in three weeks of work on something that's radically different, it's a good idea to make sure you've got approval."

And of course, all the boxes and wires won't make a difference if staffers get preoccupied with technology and forget that the mission is to give the reader a better magazine. But at Thrasher, that doesn't seem likely. "I could drop-kick all this stuff into the dumpster and go right back to cutting and pasting," says Thatcher, as he grabs a skateboard and heads for the parking lot. "I wouldn't like it, but I could do it."