During Hispanic Heritage Month this past September, the Chicago lowrider festival, Slow & Low, turned Navy Pier into a civic space for a living culture. The festival is a public exhibition authored by the community it serves, taking on intensified significance this year amid increasing threats against the Latino community across the US.
Curators Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward Magic Calderon brought more than sixty car clubs together for the event, which featured an eye-catching brand identity by Span Studio led by partner Nick Adam. The aesthetic and energy of lowrider culture are incredibly vibrant and distinct, so it was critical that Span harness that with their visuals. The brief demanded courage and care, and Span’s stance was to be bold and reverent, not kitsch or trend-chasing.
Span carried on the chain motif visual from the 2024 Slow & Low festival as a symbol of lineage and strength. They added vines of roses, which symbolize love, family, and faith in Chicano tradition. The identity features roses in four different stages of bloom to represent the four generations that typically gather for the festival.
Pacheco, Kepha, and Calderon included Teen Angels in the design process, an independent magazine from the 1980s that printed through the early 2000s, which was pivotal in defining the look and feel of Chicano culture. Span looked to type design studio Sharp Type, which specializes in expressive hand-style lettering that evokes the lettering characteristic of lowrider art. Span customized Sharp Type’s existing Respira contemporary blackletter typeface by softening it with marker line quality. Then, the team added a blue-to-yellow fill to the sunset image on chrome as a nod to lowrider murals and 1980s Chicago graffiti. Cordier Script, with its pinstriped, hand-lettered feel, and Rosalie for delicate flair, rounded out the type package.
Span’s system was featured on fifteen supergraphics framing portraits and gatherings across Navy Pier’s half-mile campus. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 feet of banners, wall wraps, and stage scrims anchored the site with bilingual messaging, and the nARCHITECTS WaveWall served as a public gallery for reflection. Wristbands, plaques, posters, bandanas, totes, shirts, koozies, and dashboard plaques were designed to be take-home mementos.
Lowriders sit at the intersection of community, art, craft, and culture, and it’s a joy to see a festival like Slow & Low capture all of that so thoughtfully and celebrate one of our country’s most unique subcultures. One that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated now more than ever.
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