Ravinia Festival Poster Competition

View Relevant Website

During 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 will 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."

I was immediately excited by the opportunity 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. The Ravinia Women's Board that sponsors the competition is still deliberating, but I will update this post with the results soon!

View this project from the bottom of the page scrolling up to view my process chronologically!

‍

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.

‍

A before and after (left to right, respectively), adding my frames seen below and a queue of Ravinia visitors heading up the tree.

‍

Having visited Ravinia myself numerous times, I am familiar with the iconic personality of Ravinia's lawn-style venue where you'll see visitors picnicking, laughing, dancing, etc. under a canopy of trees. After brainstorming some of the iconic buildings, objects, and interactions visitors experience at Ravinia, I created this series of vector representations.

‍

Experimentation with the distribution of music note leaves upon the tree.

‍

Experimentation with the appearance of music note leaves upon the tree branches.

‍

‍

Experimentation with the geometry of my tree branches.

‍

In response to my desire to achieve a more minimalist, modern approach, I created this very geometric tree branch concept.

‍

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.

‍

A vectorized version of the below seen tree branch concepts.

‍

Some drawings from my digital notebook ideating my tree branches.

‍

Added more variety in color to the border logos to visualize if I wanted to include all of Ravinia's brand colors.

‍

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).

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

This mood board was created from various resources that the competition provides, some photos I took, Ravinia's color scheme, and some iconic geometry that I wanted to find a way to include in my poster based on the way that Ravinia describes itself.

‍