Ravinia Festival Poster Competition
D
uring my 2023 fall semester at Carnegie Mellon, the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL (north of Chicago) opened a competition for artists to create "a creative, colorful poster design to promote the festival's 2024 summer season." Including a cash prize, the poster would be "sold in the Ravinia Festival Shop, as well as distributed among hundreds of Chicagoland stores and public spaces as a distinctive signature of the Ravinia season."
Contribution: All Original Work (besides moodboard
content and human figures at bottom in final)
Timeline: 4 Weeks
Material: Digital, Adobe Creative Suite
Date Completed: Fall 2023
Association: Ravinia Festival Poster Competition
Final submission.
Familial Connections
I was immediately excited by the opportunity to enter this competition given that my father, Michael Barnes, was the architect for a number of buildings on the property. It would make me proud to see both me and my father's names attached to the festival since the festival has such deep-rooted history in Chicago and our family has attended events at the venue since my sister and I were very young.
So from my own experiences at the Ravinia Festival and the festival's description of itself reading "a place where nature and music intertwine to create a shared experience that inspires each guest and the world around us," I began ideating. Unfortunately, the Ravinia Women's Board did not ending up selecting my submission to represent them for the year, but regardless I value the experience and love what I made.
Design Process
Step 2 — The very first thing that popped into my head given the prompt of this competition was to emulate the iconic stained glass windows that are seen on one of Ravinia's oldest buildings, that inspired their logo. I created this vector concept quickly in Adobe Illustrator to establish a foundation for me to begin editing.
Step 3 — I was sparked with the idea to create a tree made of music staffs (the iconic 5 parallel bars that are the base for all sheet music) to then fill with music notes to represent the leaves of the tree. And so, I began creating a simple vectorization of what was in my mind.
Step 4 — Getting their official logo in early was important to me as that is the most important feature that must stand out. I also added their logos to the border, inspired by the stained glass windows that are seen on one of their most iconic buildings at the venue (see my mood board below).
Step 5 — Added more variety in color to the border logos to visualize if I wanted to include all of Ravinia's brand colors.
Step 6 — Some drawings from my digital notebook ideating my tree branches.
Step 7 — A vectorized version of the above tree branch concepts.
Step 8 — An adaptation of the vectorized concept seen below that wanes off the edges of my tree branches. I wasn't happy with how classical it was appearing. I was going for more of a contemporary, minimal aesthetic.
Step 9 — In response to my desire to achieve a more minimalist, modern approach, I created this very geometric tree branch concept.
Step 10 — Experimentation with the geometry of my tree branches.
Step 11 — My finalized tree branches.
Step 12 — Experimentation with the appearance of music note leaves upon the tree branches.
Step 13 — Experimentation with the distribution of music note leaves upon the tree.
Step 14 — Experimentation with the distribution of music note leaves upon the tree.
Step 16 — A before and after (left to right, respectively), adding my frames seen below and a queue of Ravinia visitors heading up the tree.
Step 17 — Some last-minute experimentation with color, maintaining the bold green over black and white Ravinia-brand color scheme. I chose to stick with my existing variant.
Final submission.
Project Takeaways
F
rom this project, I take away much experience and knowledge about the behaviors, properties, and limitations of wood, especially beechwood. It was very valuable to spend so much time amongst my peers in the machine shop, forming not only connections but having people to bounce ideas and advice off of. I appreciated having complete creative control over this project, and I think my attention
to detail and experience working with wood shines through this project. Going forward, if I were to do this project again, I would broaden my use of sketching along the way. Often times I get caught up in the details of a particular form and become a perfectionist, but to embrace slight imperfection in favor of zooming out to analyze the whole will likely prove to be a beneficial practice for me.