Black Swamp Festival Poster Project

The Black Swamp Arts Festival is a free annual celebration of artists and musicians in the Bowling Green community. For the past 34 years, the BSAF has been growing, getting more and more local creatives involved!

Enter Kelsey. In addition to being a Designer/Project manager at Damen Jackson, Kelsey is an award-winning creative professional, local to the Toledo/Bowling Green communities. Highly involved in her local arts scene, she has worked with the BSAF for a handful of years helping with design work and marketing. This year, Kelsey submitted an original piece for the BSAF lineup poster.

However, when Kelsey designed the poster for the 2025 Black Swamp Arts Festival, she didn’t just create a single piece of artwork. She built a visual system that could extend across collateral, signage, and promotion while still preserving the spirit of the festival. As a result, Kelsey took home 2 first place ADDY awards! We caught up with Kelsey to learn more about her creative process, challenges she overcame and what’s next for her!

How the Relationship with Black Swamp Began

Katie: Can you walk us through how you first got involved with Black Swamp and how your work with the marketing committee has evolved over time?

Kelsey: A few friends and I run a social media page called Toledo Creatives. It started just before COVID in 2019 and has grown to more than two thousand members. People share ideas, sell gear, ask for critiques, and connect with one another there.

In late 2021, Carmen, who leads the Black Swamp marketing committee, posted that they were looking for a volunteer graphic designer to help create marketing collateral for the following year. At the time, I was looking for volunteer work that felt more tactile and relevant to my day-to-day creative work, and I also wanted to up my portfolio. I messaged her right away, and that is how it started.

That first year, I ended up helping shape the poster layout because the artist was working in a traditional painted medium and did not have a graphic design background. I worked on the poster structure, social media assets, newspaper and web ads, signage, merchandise, and all the other pieces that had to come together as the festival got closer. That has essentially been my role on the committee ever since.

The Brief

Luke: Can you give a quick overview of the original brief, the challenge behind the poster project, and the expected deliverables?

Kelsey: The brief is simple, and it’s the same every year: design a poster for the festival. The required elements are the festival logo, the name, the date, the city, the note “all events free”, and room for sponsor logos. The poster can be created in any medium, whether that is graphic design, painting, photography, or even printmaking. In the past, there have been linocut and wood-print approaches, which were really cool.

From there, the marketing committee collaborates with the poster artist to create the rest of the marketing collateral based on the look of the poster. Typically, the poster isn’t designed with the intention of becoming a complete branded system, that’s not usually the approach.

Luke: Knowing the brief was open-ended, how did you pull together the influences and references that shaped both the poster and the larger system?

Kelsey: I looked at a lot of music festival posters for inspiration, and one that stood out was the 1969 Woodstock poster by Arnold Skolnick. Music festival posters are often visually intense and full of information, but that Woodstock poster is very simple. There are straightforward shapes, and even the typography feels restrained. I wanted to create something with that same clarity, where people could immediately understand what they were looking at.

Designing for a System, Not Just a Poster

Katie: The standard approach isn’t usually to build a system, but that was your instinct. How did that shape the way you approached the project?

Kelsey: It definitely gave me a leg up. I’ve been volunteering on the marketing committee for the past three years, helping create collateral alongside the poster artist. It can be difficult to make everything feel cohesive when the original poster is made in a very traditional medium, especially when it’s not digital. The first festival I worked on had a hand-made piece at its center, and it was hard to pull out reusable elements from it. I couldn’t just extract an icon or a motif and scale it across applications. I had to create new elements from scratch that matched the vibe of the artist’s work. Having experience as a brand designer helped me think about how to make my poster concept scalable across multiple touchpoints from the beginning.

Luke: What was the most challenging part of building that system?

Kelsey: The overall system wasn’t that difficult to build, but one detail took a lot of work: the thumbprint in the background. That was the most detailed part of the poster. I drew every shape by hand and had to make sure it flowed correctly around the page and around the festival logo. I kept revisiting it, deciding I didn’t like how it was sizing out, and starting over. It took a long time to get right.

The Detail That Carries the Message

Luke: Is there a detail in the final work that you are especially proud of, something people may not notice right away?

Kelsey: Definitely the thumbprint. First, it was the heaviest lift from a design standpoint. Second, it was the only element on the printed poster that used UV spot ink, so when you catch it in the light it has this glossy finish. But most importantly, it carries the core message I wanted the poster to express, which is the intersection of humanity, art, and nature. Art is embedded in our DNA as humans. We have used it for communication and self-expression for as long as we’ve existed. Nature is the art of the universe, and patterns appear everywhere in it. Our fingerprints even resemble the growth rings of trees. To me, it’s all connected, and the thumbprint became the clearest way to communicate that.

“Art is embedded in our DNA as humans. We have used it for communication and self-expression for as long as we’ve existed. Nature is the art of the universe, and patterns appear everywhere in it. Our fingerprints even resemble the growth rings of trees. To me, it’s all connected, and the thumbprint became the clearest way to communicate that.”

Recognition, Production, and Local Impact

Katie: When you submitted the poster, were you able to influence how it was physically produced?

Kelsey: Yes. The poster artist works directly with HOT Graphics, a local printing company in Toledo that has been producing these posters for years. The artist helps decide things like paper stock, special inks, and any finishing details. In the past, there have even been die-cut posters with custom shapes. For the poster artist, it’s a matter of checking in with the marketing committee about the budget and then working through the production choices from there.

Luke: This whole project is so rooted in Toledo and the surrounding area. Is that local connection important to the festival?

Kelsey: Absolutely. Most of the artists who vend at the fest or submit work for the juried competitions are at least regionally local, though there are participants from around the country as well. It’s a diverse mix, but the festival makes a real effort to highlight local artists every year.

Luke: As someone deeply involved in your local art scene, what does winning these awards mean to you?

Kelsey: It means a lot. This is the first award I have won for work done outside of DJ, which makes it especially meaningful. I’ve spent years contributing to Toledo’s art community in various ways, and while I never do it for recognition, it is nice to receive that support and feel seen. Since the award ceremony, I have heard from so many people I’ve crossed paths with over the years, and that kind of response is a reminder that people notice the work you put in.

Favorite Moments and What Comes Next

Luke: What have been some of the highlights of working with Black Swamp so far?

Kelsey: The people are a huge part of it. Everyone on the board is wonderful to work with. Many of them are from Bowling Green and have deep roots there. Some come from adjacent creative organizations in Toledo, and others have been involved with the festival for decades. Their dedication is inspiring.

My favorite moment this year was the poster reveal party. The poster artist gets to host that event each year, and I held mine at Juniper Brewing Co. in Downtown Bowling Green. A friend of mine (a DJ) came and spun music, I spoke with local journalists, and I met longtime festival attendees who have been collecting the posters since the festival began in 1993. Some of my college professors came too, which made it feel very full circle as a Bowling Green State University alum.

Katie: What is on the horizon for you now?

Kelsey: I will continue serving on the Black Swamp marketing committee, and I am helping with some off-season fundraising work as well. Recently, my husband and I were also asked by one of his college professors to judge this year’s student art show at the local community college. That has been exciting, especially because it feels like not that long ago I was in those students’ shoes.

Advice for Younger Designers

Katie: What would you tell the next generation of designers, or anyone who might want to submit a poster in future years?

Kelsey: Make what’s in your heart. Create what you think looks right, not what you think other people want to see. That was something I struggled with in college. I was often creating for my professors and their rubrics instead of for myself.

After college, I had to relearn how to create in a way that let my personality come through. My advice is to trust the first idea that comes to you, even if it seems strange or risky. Try it anyway and see where it leads.

Luke: You also seem to have built a strong network after college. Do you have advice for young creatives who are trying to make connections once school ends?

Kelsey: Find opportunities that align with what you genuinely care about. For me, that meant gravitating toward Toledo and the creative spaces that matched the life I wanted to build. The Toledo Arts Commission was an early catalyst. I started volunteering in 2017, met people through that work, and over time my network grew naturally. The key was pursuing the spaces and missions that already felt meaningful to me.