Case Study

Pygmalion

Pygmalion is a long-running, multi-day festival rooted in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. It recently celebrated its 20-year anniversary. What began as a music festival gradually grew into something broader and more holistic. Alongside concerts, it expanded to include literature, tech, food, a craft fair, and a mix of more niche, experimental performances. If you want the full backstory, Wikipedia covers it well, and the Pygmalion history page documents every artist who’s played the festival, year by year.

My relationship with the festival stretches across a lot of years and a lot of versions of myself. From 2008 through 2016, and again in 2024 and 2025, I worked as the sole graphic designer as the identity slowly evolved. Early on, the system was intentionally simple, built on a consistent structure and differentiated mostly through color. In 2014, it needed a reset. From 2015 through 2017, the work settled into a more expressive language, using multicolored rings to represent the different strands of the festival and give everything a shared logic. In 2024, I was asked to return and refresh the brand for the festival’s 20th anniversary. The goal wasn’t reinvention. It was continuity. To respect what people remembered, tighten the system, and make sure it still felt alive. This project is less about any single moment and more about the continued evolution and persistence of Pygmalion, an institution I’m proud to be associated with.

Pygmalion

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