In business for just over a year, Woody Holliman's Flywheel Design has amassed an impressive roster of local clients: the Durham Chamber of Commerce, the Duke engineering school and UNC's urban-studies center, the distribution firm Bowe Bell + Howell and the medical equipment manufacturer TriVirix International, among them.

"We started with zero clients," he said the other morning in his company's quarters at 409 East Chapel Hill St.

Holliman figured it was time to "give back." And so, as the sun rises this morning, Holliman, his three staff designers and four freelance designers are wrapping up a 24-hour "DesignAThon" during which they have created and embellished graphics, brochures, Web pages and the like for 20 worthy causes.

They began at 10 a.m. Friday and are working through, with the aid of donated coffee and chocolate, until 10 a.m. today.

"Presumably," he said, looking ahead to the experience, "we'll have our wits about us."

A native of Connecticut who earned graduate degrees in philosophy and, later, fine arts at the University of Wisconsin, Holliman came to the Triangle in a quest for warmer weather.

"It was an impulse move," he said. "I've had a zig-zag career."

At that point, he was a striving "gallery artist" looking for a teaching job. When that proved difficult to find, he taught himself to be a graphic designer. Those skills in hand, he landed a post at Raleigh's Peace College, and spent seven years there working 60-hour weeks as head of its program in art and design.

"It morphed into something not what I had in mind," he said. Now a more-than full-time administrator, he missed the creative side of his vocation. With no idea how to run a business, with "a mortgage, a daughter and a wife," he made his break in the spring of 2004.

Working out of his Old North Durham home, Holliman said he read up on "guerrilla marketing," called on new businesses, went door to door, involved himself in his neighborhood association, worked pro bono to get exposure and developed contacts with Durham agencies such as Downtown Durham Inc., the Arts and Business Coalition Downtown and the Historic Preservation Society.

"Graphic design is a word-of-mouth business," he said.

Holliman's approach to the business mixes hip computer capabilities and old-fashioned hands-on labor with pencil and paintbrush. Business started coming his way, enough that he could start hiring help.

Holliman said he "hired for attitude" and trained his new employees in whatever skills they needed: "I've been a teacher all my life." His three staff designers all started, like Holliman, as gallery artists, with the hands-on experience he wanted. Holliman also has a half-time office manager on his payroll, and has a symbiotic relationship with marketing guru Joe Syrowik, who rents an office in the ground-floor space Flywheel occupied last March.

"We love the space, the light and being downtown," Holliman said, and the storefront location on Chapel Hill Street is good for corporate visibility. Visibility, in his word-of-mouth trade, was part of the idea behind this weekend's DesignAThon, Holliman admitted, but he emphasized the event's charitable aspect.

"I like to give back," Holliman said.

He had the idea for "kind of a party -- anything is more fun when you've got people to do it with." To augment his staff, he engaged "friends and colleagues we thought might be up for this," then, in August, invited nonprofit organizations to apply for DesignAThon services: advertisements, posters, brochures, Web sites.

Holliman figured eight designers could turn out about 18 projects in the time allowed. He got 47 applications. Picking which to work on was tough.

"Was it kids with cancer or AIDS patients who have no place to live?" he said. As it turned out, "There were 20 we were not going to turn down." Some of the selected agencies, he said, had been wanting such products for a long time.

One of those is Mallarme Chamber Players, for which Flywheel is upgrading a Website.

"This is something we've had on our wish list for years," said Kirsten Berlin, manager of the ensemble. "We're really wanted to get a new look."

New and improved, she said, the Web site will "help our communications. ... getting our site to be more user-friendly and something people will go to to find out what's happening with Mallarme." It will also enable prospective patrons to make donations or purchases online, she said.

Another DesignAThon beneficiary is the Durham Literacy Center, which is getting a brochure for its November money-raising campaign.

"We think that having a professionally developed brochure will elicit a better response," said center director Reginald Hodges. "People can see some of the people we serve and our classes and so forth."

Other beneficiaries include the American Dance Festival, Clean Energy Durham, the Durham-San Ramon (Nicaragua) Sister Communities Project, the AIDS Community Residence Association, Council for Senior Citizens and Hoop Dreams Basketball Academy -- among others, from the Make-A-Wish Foundation to the Triangle Jazz Society.

It's a varied mix for a varied town. "Durham is just such a helter-skelter melting pot," Holliman said. The town is also, he said, "an acquired taste" -- but one that, after some time, he has come to like.

"Life has been good to me. Durham has been good to me," he said. "This business has been good to me."