Father Wild Forum Art History

What’s up my nerds! My name is Evan Pilak and I am an art assistant here at MUSG in the Communications Department. Last year I was the Creative Director and had the privilege to design the last three Father Wild forums. For those who are unfamiliar with the forum, this is a unique opportunity for open dialog between the student body and senior management here at Marquette.

Coming up with ideas for the Forum is a difficult task. Because of Father Wild’s awesome last name, puns and play-on words are a natural choice. “Born to Be Wild”, “Where the Wild Things Are”, “Wild Wild West” are all titles of past Father Wild Forums. They are easy to execute artistically and tons of fun to photoshop.

Lauren Lakomek designed this fantastic piece for the fall forum. She left on his collar which is a nice subtle touch.

This is soo cool. The font is perfect, the AMU union is illustrated so well too! Interactive promotions are always fun especially when it’s finding cardboard cutouts of people.

Here is what I did with the Father Wild Forum for fall of 2009.

The movie was just about to come out, and this was a playful way to include Fr. Wild and one of the Wild things. It’s simple but I think effective.  It took a long time to get that kid outta there and correctly color the arms. As you can see, giving away iPods are a common theme. The event was a success and gave me more autonomy to create even wackier designs in the spring. Which brings us to my idea to add Kanye West into a photo with Father Wild. The theme was “Wild Wild West”, get it?

The idea was rejected, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for these three (two technically) Amigos. All three of them are enjoying a roaring campfire and maybe a woodsy song sung by Fr. Wild #1 in the design.

The final design turned out like this:

I really liked how it turned out, despite the lack of Kanye West. It is based off a picture from 1888 and allowed me to finally use the font ROSEWOOD.

This fall’s forum was a different story. Because I am only here for a semester, this Father Wild forum will be the last one I am involved with. I wanted to take the forum into a completely different direction. It also helped that I was running out of good puns.

Some ideas that wouldn’t work are

Wild Boar: Photoshop Fr. Wild on this animal… somehow

I already have the Marquette Tribune headline ready (royalty checks!) for after the forum: Wild Bores*

*note this is far from the truth but good puns can’t be passed up, they just can’t

Into The Wild: Put Fr. Wild on the bus

This idea would not be all that comical (*spoiler alert* the kid dies at the end of the movie). Plus finding a side profile of Wild would be dang near tricky, unless I went around campus searching for him to take a candid picture of his side profile (again!). It would be difficult and I would risk being arrested, and I can’t afford to go to jail again.

After a few sketches the idea to keep the designs ominous and vague gained traction.

People will be more intrigued to check out our website (musg.mu.edu) to find out more about this event. The “?” is pretty slick, and attention grabbing enough to get you to stop and look. However, offering no information on the event and simply a website is risky. It is very easy for the advertisement to be ignored because it challenges the reader to take an active role in finding out information about the event, rather than telling them everything. Lucky our website is easy to remember and rolls of the tongue (ITS-M-U-S-G-DOT-M-U, FINISH-THAT-WITH-EDU-FOO!).

As I am writing this, the event has not yet happened. Time will tell on the success of the promotional direction for this event. Regardless, I am very thankful for the autonomy and encouragement by other members of MUSG (shout out Jimmy and Ashley) to go with the idea. I think it was a success. I’m a big fan of question marks too; they are sooo existential.

One thing I have yet to mention is Fr. Wild’s good nature and awesomeness throughout all of my crazy ideas. His openness and willingness to be photoshoped pretty much everywhere has made all the difference.

So that’s my story about that. If you would like to find out more about the designs, good luck.

Happy reading!

Evan Pilak

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