In 1999 my Grandma bought my older Sister and I our first computer, the iMac Special Edition. This was unheard of in a working-class immigrant household at the time because of Apple's rather hefty price tag. You were lucky to get a PC at home, let alone an Apple computer that was easily 4 to 5 times the price of its PC counterpart. My Grandma must have known something we didn't, and I thank her for having that level of foresight. Soon after getting the iMac I got my hands on Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Nothing was the same for me after that day. My creative ideas were no longer limited by my artistic capacity on pen and paper. A whole new world of creativity was unveiled, where the only limits were the onesI set. I was 12 years old at the time with an insatiable creative mind that was ready to get to work. Fast forward a year later to 13, I learned a fair amount of Photoshop and Illustrator with endless nights of trial-and-error and a little help from Youtube or as I affectionately call it, "Youtube University". I've gotten a couple of my "degrees" from them.

Now officially a teenager I yearned eagerly to make money to buy myself the things I wanted. I started selling sneakers on eBay and things went as well as they could given the little capital I had to invest on the products I could buy and sell. I arrived at a crossroads where selling the tangible proved to be too expensive with little return. I had no choice but to explore the intangible world of selling ideas in graphic form. A world I was completely unfamiliar with but fully prepared to learn hands on.

With a point and click and a couple finger strokes at my keyboard my first "logo design" listing went up on eBay for a couple hundred dollars. After a couple of days of being listed, my first client came walking through the virtual doors of the internet unknowing that on the other side was an inexperienced 13-year-old boy who they had just commissioned to design their company logo. The company who hired me for their project was named "Truitt Architects", a small Architectural firm based out of Houston, Texas. I communicated entirely through email to avoid exposing my adolescent voice that would have easily given away my young age and possibly my inexperience. The client was looking for something simple, and asked to stay away from anything that could be confused for a real estate company. I put together a couple of different options and the one that rose to the top was a logo that used a T-Square (a tool commonly used in architectural drafting) as the foundation for the logo since it was an object easily identified in their industry and also was literally a "T" that worked to symbolize the "Truitt!" part of their name. I battled with it for a couple of days, and voilà with a couple of twists and turns of accompanying text it was done! The company was thrilled with their new logo and so was I. My first commissioned logo was in the books and I was off and running with no stopping in sight.

Since then I've been fascinated by the power of logos. Fascinated by the challenge of driving a big idea home in its simplest visual form that sears its company's virtues into a viewer’s brain within seconds of its first contact. Each logo is different and possess its own respective challenges, but when you get it right it's absolute magic!