Successful Failures: Thirty Years of Lumpens, Radical Media and Building Communities of the Future was an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center featuring dozens of intertwined past, present, and future projects from thousands of contributors. The show celebrated publications, programs, festivals, restaurants, breweries, art, and beyond, and it was in this spirit of collaboration and experimentation that its living logotype was born.

For each of the letters in the exhibition name, multiple versions were designed and built into a working font that the exhibition designers could explore and set as they saw fit. Some letterforms were pulled straight from the logos of the various initiatives featured in the show, while the rest were designed without constraint through various physical and digital mediums. On-site and in collateral, the same instance of the mark seldom appeared twice. The logo itself was designed to be a “Successful Failure” of sorts—not every permutation of letterforms worked perfectly, but each embodied the bold and fearless nature of the work it was designed to represent.

Successful Failures