Probably the most important question of my career — how did you start and how did you know?

It started with Microsoft Word. Why should school essays be only in Times? At the time, I believed Arial was the best because it was clean and modern, not ordained with serifs. I saw Papyrus show up everywhere and in 2005 I was in awe — a font perfect for my project on Japan’s Himeji Castle. It was rough and elegant with short x-heights.

In high school I loved being the designated designer for school projects. My freshmen year, I created a “picture book” with images from Wikipedia about the Renaissance. In Chemistry, I created lab documents with beautiful covers — colors in shades of litmus test strips.

It was in the first semester of my Junior year that I saw a t-shirt that my classmates were raving about. It was from a YouTube troupe called WongFu Productions. The short film “Are You A Nice Guy” was lesson on the cliché “nice guys finish last” and that being Nice is something to embrace.

Anyways, the t-shirt produced for the video is a monogram lowercase “n” and uppercase “G”. I decided to rift off this idea because it was so popular at my school.

My high school, Lowell High School in SF is one of the top academic public schools in California. Everyone’s super smart. So instead of Nice Guy, I made a shirt called Smart Guy and another one called Smart Girl.

To sell this shirt, I created advertisement, small 8.5x11 posters. But to get this sold, I needed to go big.

So I got the school clubs involved. I created this as a t-shirt fundraiser. If you sold 9 shirts, which were $15 each, you could earn a free t-shirt. This was the secret sauce. After a few weeks, I sold about 270 t-shirts! It was shipped, and I distributed the shirt orders to the sellers.

And I earned money. I forgot how much — but I had to do it again.

So I created a new t-shirt with the word LOVE on it in different languages. It was a fundraiser with the school Language Department. With the same process in selling, the biggest difference instead of 2 different t-shirts, I made one design on seven different t-shirts. V-neck and Crew necks.

In the end, I sold 900 shirts. The school received about $2,700. And I of course received a substantial amount of money.

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The story continues, but I’m almost off my stop. Wouldn’t want to end mid-message.