Cantigny Park Fall Festival

Poster Design

I designed an autumnal typographic poster for Cantigny Park’s 2019 Fall Festival, a seasonal community event. The poster was selected for public use at the festival and continued to appear on the venue’s website through 2022.

Visual Identity

The poster’s visual identity is built entirely around a typographic calligram inspired by falling leaves: each letter of the composition is shaped to suggest an organic, leaf-like form. The lettering was the central graphic element, the primary design feature around which everything else was arranged.

This work is not Cantigny Park’s official logo or the park’s established festival branding. It was selected by Cantigny Park for public use at the venue, featured as a lightbox display, and appeared on the park’s website through 2022.

A Cantigny Park marketing intern used the calligram design as a guide to carve pumpkins for the event.

Research and Development

The design was developed from a brief for a fall festival poster. I sketched concepts exploring typographic letterforms, experimenting with leaf shapes and organic curves: working from the idea of autumn leaves falling, before arriving at a composition that communicated the seasonal theme purely through expressive lettering.

The final design process involved crafting the typographic letterforms one character at a time, refining the proportions and flow of the leaf-shaped letters, and preparing the poster for both print and web presentation.

Presentation

The poster was displayed at the venue as a framed poster and as a lightbox in the lobby, and the artwork appeared on the venue’s website. The project demonstrated how a single typographic design could be presented across multiple contexts.

The artwork remained on Cantigny Park’s website through 2022.