SPD: What year?
Krista Prestek: 1990ish

SPD: What were you up to?
KP: I was wading my way through junior high in suburban Seattle.  

SPD: What magazine?
KP: Seventeen

SPD: What was it that so enthralled you?
KP: This is probably stating the obvious, but middle school in the early 90’s was a wasteland. You know things are bad when stirrup pants are one of the more progressive fashion choices available. So I was casting around for a lifeline and I found magazines and just fell in love. Here were people who knew how to deal with love and family and makeup and the weird social politics of being 14 – all of the BIG ISSUES.

I was reading a lot of different titles – YM, Cosmo, Sassy – but of all of them, Seventeen was like a beacon. The photography was really a cut above and there was one cover in particular that I think hooked me -- July 1990, Cameron Diaz, before she was an actress. She had a red, white, and blue shirt and big American flag earrings and a HUGE smile. I mean, she was radiant. It was mesmerizing. I found that reading Seventeen was like getting a peek of what might exist on the other side of 9th grade and it gave me hope.

SPD: Do you know now who the creatives were?
KP: I’d love to know. I haven’t been able to find a masthead.

SPD: How does that inform your creative now?
KP: The covers they were doing really hold up in my opinion. Looking at them again for the first time in more than two decades, I remember a lot of them vividly and I can see why -- the spirit, the color, these amazing models telegraphing happiness. I’d be proud now to have had a hand in work like that.