Slow & Low: 2025 Lowrider Festival

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2026

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Across Navy Pier’s half-mile campus, fifteen supergraphic walls transform the festival grounds into a welcoming environment that signals belonging at every scale.
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Festival flyers are designed as keepsakes. Saved, displayed, and collected by the car clubs exhibiting their vehicles.
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Spanning 170,000 square feet, the festival uses thirty sets of overhead banners to bring the ceiling down and create a more intimate, cathedral-like atmosphere.
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For the festival, hundreds of posters and merchandise items are created—not only to promote the event, but to endure as artifacts of the culture and the day itself.
For many families, Slow & Low becomes more than a festival: it is a setting for reunions, quinceañeras, photographs, and memories carried forward across generations.

Sunlight on chrome. Prayer in paint. Lowriding is more than customization. It is an American and Chicano art form built from devotion, design, memory, and pride. In 2025, as scrutiny around Latino identity intensified, Slow & Low faced a direct question: hide or shine?

During Hispanic Heritage Month, the festival answered by transforming Navy Pier into a civic stage for a living culture. Curators Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward “Magic” Calderon united more than sixty car clubs, bringing together families, artists, builders, and multigenerational communities. In close collaboration with the curators, with the client we led a civic-scale identity system built to carry that voice with courage and care.

Slow & Low is a public exhibition authored by the community it serves. The identity needed to be bold without spectacle, reverent without nostalgia, and accessible without flattening the depth of the tradition. The goal was not to decorate lowrider culture from the outside, but to help create the conditions for it to be seen, celebrated, and respected at full scale.

The system builds on a chain motif as a symbol of lineage, continuity, and strength. Around it, roses bloom and vines climb. Drawn from bud to full bloom, the roses reflect the four generations often present together at the festival. In Chicano visual traditions, roses carry associations of love, family, faith, and Marian imagery. Here, ornament becomes a living system of protection, devotion, and growth.

Typography is the central voice. The curators brought Teen Angels into the conversation, the influential magazine that helped define how Chicano culture looked, read, and represented itself. Rather than imitate that history, we translated its spirit through a contemporary typographic system rooted in expressive hand styles, blackletter influence, script virtuosity, and calligraphic warmth.

At the center is a customized version of Respira, softened with a marker-like hand and filled with a blue-to-yellow gradient that feels like sunset on chrome. The gesture nods to lowrider murals, sign painting, devotional graphics, and 1980s Chicago graffiti without pastiche. It is reverent and defiant, soft but not fragile.

Extended through Cordier Script and Rosalie, the identity brings together pinstriping, hand lettering, ornate grace, roses, vines, chains, and color into a system that breathes with the culture it represents.

The result is a festival identity that carries pride at civic scale: authored with the community, built from lineage, and designed to let Slow & Low shine without dilution and without fear.

Design Direction, Design
Nick Adam
Design, Animation
Kevin Moreland
Illustration
Alec Hudson
Curatorial Team, Creative Director
Lauren M. Pacheco
Curatorial Team, Creative Director
Peter Kepha
Curatorial Team, Photographer
Edward Magico Calderon
Photographer
Max Herman
Photographer
Nick Lipton
Photographer
Katrina Nelken
Photographer
Mike Pocious