"Hugo Logo Ego and Igo A-Gogo"

Occasionally, I rush in where angels fear to tread, bite off more than I can chew and lose my head when all those about me are keeping theirs, not to mention frequent bouts of cliché abuse. But when the lovely and/or talented John Scalzi mentioned that the Hugo Awards are staging a competition for a logo design, I was inspired to jump in head first. Now, I do not claim to be a good visual artist (which is why I own the domain name PhotoSlop.com which I will be putting to some use soon). But a few moments pondering about the prestigious awards for a class of massively imaginative writers and looking at the design of the award trophy (a shiny metal retro-style rocket with relatively little phallic resemblance) and I had an extremely cool idea. Now all I had to do is turn it into a non-sloppish vector image. After a few hours fumbling with my open-source graphics tools (and realizing how visualizing this idea involved some stuff I had never tried before), I came up with the following not-clean image.

No, seriously, that is the image that was in my head, the letters H-U-G-O stacked up on each other with the H affixed to the cover of a book while the Hugo Award Trophy is blasting off from inside the O. (At least I didn’t have any cute concepts to attach to the other two letters, except for a 3-D effect I couldn’t get right to save my life)

If there is anybody out there with some real graphic artistic ability who doesn’t believe this design sucks green eggs and ham and would like to clean it up into something presentable to submit, I would gladly give 60% of the fabulous prize package in the extremely unlikely circumstance that it wins. The deadline for entries is May 31st. I might be able to become semi-proficient in 3-D text before then, but I doubt it. And if you can’t help me with the design but still don’t believe this design sucks green eggs and ham, please let me know. My inner critic and inner perfectionist are ganging up on my inner insecure artist right now and it’s not pretty.