(Above) Here's a personal favorite: the logo that got me started on the road to becoming a graphic designer.

You see, back in the spring of '96 I was still firmly entrenched in the "world of letters" -- a struggling young writer with only the most cursory acquaintance with graphics programs and little thought of expanding my artistic horizons. True, I'd done a handful of photo montages for the novel I was working on, but there was every reason to believe that these would ultimately be rejected as "impractical" come publication time; they were mainly there to help catch the eye of an editor.

At any rate, I'd just been accepted into the Clarion West Writers' Workshop slated for that summer and was casting about for some clever means of promoting my work to the professionals who would be teaching there. I wanted, essentially, to create a little "buzz" -- a bit of anticipation and favorable word-of-mouth that would keep the project on people's radar screens for the length of time it would take to get the book done. And since the novel I was a social satire about marketing, it seemed appropriate to do a little marketing of my own -- which is how a friend and I cooked up a scheme to print t-shirts purporting to be from one of the companies in the novel and distribute them to my classmates.

The rest, as they say, is history: the t-shirts proved to be a real hit at the workshop, giving rise to an expanded line of offerings and, ultimately, a small company.

And though NUKE radioActivewear -- the physical entity -- has been permanently mothballed, the concept itself -- and the design lessons it taught me -- live on in the multimedia novel that grew out of that original draft, awaiting the day when that final chapter will be written ... and the power will finally be unleashed. ;-)