Way back, somewhere around 1993-94, I was sitting in a high school study hall at good ol’ Northern Lehigh School District. For some reason I see myself in a classroom in the junior high building. Which doesn’t make sense because I would have been in the senior high school at that time. I could also be misremembering some details. Whatever the case, this particular study hall was supervised by the head football coach. It was the only time I had ever seen this guy in a classroom. I don’t recall him even being a teacher on staff. I never really liked the guy. Always thought he was full of himself. Anyway, coach somehow knew who I was and that I did illustration work. And asked me that day if I would draw something small for him. He wanted to have hats made for the team. A drawing of the bulldog mascot in front of an “N” that he wanted based on the Northwestern Football font. I agreed to it on the condition I get one of the hats.

This is the original drawing. Found this puppy buried deep in the archives. I can’t even tell you what pen or marker I used. Looks like crap quality. On cheap copy paper and tracing paper yet. I think I made photocopies of this and used scissors and tape to assemble the final image. That was the technology available to me at the time.

The hats were made. Then… the design was put on the team helmets. And then other signage around the campus. I was a little upset about that. I would have invested more time and effort if I knew it was going beyond a small run of embroidered hats. And I would have negotiated for better compensation. At least credit for the design. But I did it on a handshake. There was no contract.

I graduated and mostly got over it.

I just did some googling and it looks like my unaltered design was used up until at least 2003. Probably longer but I quit looking for pics with it. So it had a good run.

Eventually someone cleaned up my design. They did a good job. Here is the current design that you can find plastered all over the school and community:

You can see a big jump from my teenage chicken scratch to some fancy vector illustration (that I was not involved in). But I like to think that it was based on my work.

Moral of the story? Get things in writing, folks.

Also, I never did get a hat.