When I was 11 years old, my elementary school held a contest to choose a new logo design.

Our school mascot was a roadrunner.

This was in rural Southern California, where you sometimes see these birds darting around in dry scrubby habitats.

Up to that point, the school's logo was an illustration of a roadrunner that looked,

well, I'd say, pretty familiar to anyone who's watched TV in the last 60 years.

Meep, meep. I guess copyright infringement wasn't such a concern back in the 80s? Ah, those were

simple times. For this contest, any student could submit

their own design for the new logo. I was an artistic kid and I jumped at the opportunity to put

my skills to the test. I was going to win this thing, dang it. You could enter as many logo designs

as you wanted and I ended up submitting

half a dozen or so. I didn't take the predictable, uninspired approach of simply tweaking the

existing school logo. I didn't just slap a fresh coat of paint on the old rip-off Looney Tunes

Roadrunner. I wanted to draw a more realistic roadrunner, like the actual bird,

because even as a naive little sixth grader,

I was already keenly interested in science and natural history.

So, long story short, I won the contest.

I was super proud and excited. My Roadrunner was soon

splashed across the front of t-shirts worn by my teachers and classmates all around the school.

It was featured on school stationary, on banners, and all that sort of stuff. How good was my

Roadrunner drawing? Was it more biologically accurate than its

predecessor? I called my mom recently, and amazingly, she was able to dredge up a copy of my old logo

from a dusty box in her garage. I'll post the artwork on my Patreon page, so that's a little

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