Slow & Low is Chicago’s largest lowrider festival. This curated community-cultural public sphere exhibition explores and presents Lowrider culture as an original form of American folk and contemporary art. The customized car becomes a way of expressing beauty and self-expression by owners, master craftspeople, and innovative mechanics, through modifications including wire wheel rims with whitewall tires, custom pinstriping and upholstery, airbrush muralism, and other contributing visual aesthetics and material objects.

Lowriding began in the 1940s when Mexican American veterans in southern California used their World War II mechanical training to modify cars, especially Chevys, so they rode “low and slow” rather than “hot and fast.” During the Chicano Movement of the 1970s, lowriders took on political roles through car clubs that offered community services and embraced pro-pueblo imagery like flowers, warriors, and geometric designs drawn from Indigenous Mexican stories. These “mobile canvases” used style as resistance, echoed in the Pachuca/o fashion that emerged as a symbol of rebellion.

That same spirit of crafted expression extends into the Slow and Low festival’s visual identity.

Respira made such an impact on past Slow & Low projects that it became part of the visual language people now associate with the festival. For the 2025 edition, the design team pushed the system forward and leaned even more into Sharp Type, customizing Respira to bring in a warmer, marker-drawn feel for the headlines.

It was paired with Cordier Script and Rosalie to amplify the hand-lettered, lowrider-forward voice the curators were aiming for. Together, the combination honored Chicano typographic lineage without imitating it, giving the full civic-scale identity a grounded, expressive backbone.

Design direction and design by Nick Adam at Span, with design and animation by Kevin Moreland and illustration by Alec Hudson. Curatorial work by Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward Magico Calderon. 2025 Day of Photographers: Ferny Ruiz, Alfonso Monroy, Carmen Ordoñez, and Melissa Reyes. Design media photography by Edward Magico Calderon, Max Herman, Nick Lipton, Katrina Nelken, and Mike Pocious

Slow & Low is Chicago’s largest independent arts festival, drawing a diverse, multi­generational audience to celebrate a uniquely American art movement born of the Chicano community. As the Midwest’s premier lowrider festival, Slow & Low is deeply rooted in art, tradition, and community, blending culture and family into a singular arts experience. Far more than a car showcase, it unites metalworkers, painters, upholsterers, textile artists, mariachis, DJs, and folkloric performers in a vibrant display of creative expression.

Founded in 2011 in Pilsen by curators Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward Magico, 2024 marks Slow & Low’s third collaboration with Nick Adam’s team at Span, resulting in the festival’s most significant turnout yet, with over 15,000 visitors in a single day. Over the past three years, Navy Pier has been the iconic backdrop for Slow & Low, with car club members likening the experience to the “Grammys” of the lowrider community.

For the 2024 festival, Span collaborated closely with the curators to craft a gala-like visual identity. This process began with co-founder and curator Peter Kepha’s sketches of chain motifs in archway form, symbolizing growth and achievement—ideals central to Kepha’s life in the Chicano community.

The 2024 Slow & Low identity that Span designed amplifies a story of exquisite craftsmanship and celebration, drawing inspiration from the intricate artistry of lowrider culture. The typographic palette features a customized version of Lucas Sharp and Wei Huang’s blackletter typeface, Respira. Adding a layer of joyful elegance this scribe-like blackletter is complemented by Alejandro Paul’s Burgues Script, based on master calligrapher Louis Madarasz’s work. Rounding out the collection is Lucas Sharp’s limited edition Sharp Freehand, a calligraphic typeface inspired by master letterer Oscar Ogg, and Sharp’s Greenstone that is connected to the tradition of tombstone carving. Together, from chains to script, the festival identity offers a striking, refined edge that mirrors the masterpieces showcased at Slow & Low.

The Slow & Low retrospective book is the first formal piece of documentation from Chicago’s thriving lowrider community. Independently published by Slow & Low, a local non-profit lowrider organization, this story comes to life through the design work of Nick Adam’s team at Span. The project showcases a photographic archive that documents twelve years of Slow & Low’s events and festivals. Deep personal and cultural context is provided through a pair of essays from Slow & Low co-founder and curator Lauren M. Pacheco and ethnographer, cultural critic, and professor Dr. Ben Chappell.

Working closely with Slow & Low co-founders, Lauren M. Pacheco and Peter Kepha, Span makes every editorial, design, and material decision for this book with a connection to lowrider culture. These nuanced characteristics illustrate a narrative rooted in belonging while emphasizing the object quality of the book. The book’s grid creates an elaborate page sequencing system that balances variation and repetition, highlighting perspective shifts and contextual relationships. Page-to-page, the photographic compositions create a filmic cadence where motion, zooming, and surrounding angles provide the viewer with a sense of cruising. The photo archive is shot by celebrated community photographers, offering an insider’s, first-person narrative. From intimate close-ups that show fathers with daughters to wider shots that showcase the social setting of thousands gathered to celebrate the moving canvases, the photo archive depicts lowriding as a way for individuals and the community to have a voice of creativity and pride. Beyond photos showcasing the elaborate details of custom cars, they show the context of lowriding—Mexican flags waving, Aztec symbols airbrushed, folklórico performances in the background. These omnipresent Mexican cultural characteristics are signatures of heritage and authorship.

The 112-page photo essay curated and sequenced by Span is printed in full color, with each photo receiving a spot gloss varnish on an already high-gloss, coated paper. The ultra-shiny quality increases the vibrancy and saturation of the candy-colored cars while offering a tactile, family photo-album feel to each image. The front and back matter of the book is printed in silver ink on natural paper, creating a contrast that heightens the reader's attention to the material intention of the book and the cars. The silver ink maintains a reflective quality akin to the engraved chrome of lowrider cars and viclas. Typographically, the body of the book is set in Canela, designed by Miguel Reyes at Commercial Type—a graceful typeface that, like lowriders, defies traditional classifications. This type is set with a sense of physics, each column of text baselines to the bottom of the page and rises to hit different heights—a gesture likened to the hydraulic bounce of a lowrider. The display type is Respira, designed by Lucas Sharp with Wei Huang at Sharp Type, a typeface inspired by blackletter—a style prevalent in lowrider and Chicano cultures.

Stark and dramatic, the cover’s vertically stacked blackletter type is stamped with white foil onto a black textile texture. The form is reminiscent of the letter-based tattoos that read top-to-bottom on the forearms of many within the lowrider community. Words composed like this are also often seen in churches, hanging from banners above the altar—an appropriate reference given the importance of faith within lowrider community members. The smyth-sewn binding allows the book to open flat, minimizing how much of an image falls into the gutter. The book ends with a collection of 360 silver ink photo booth photos featuring over 1,000 members of Chicago’s lowrider community, all taken at the 2022 Slow & Low festival at Navy Pier. In this respect, the book’s back matter functions like a yearbook.

For over 80 years, Mexican-American and Chicano artists, mechanical engineers, and craft communities have shaped the vibrant American folk art of Lowrider culture. For the past 15 years, Slow & Low has hosted festivals celebrating the individuals and clubs in the Midwest.

The Slow & Low curators approached Span with a determination to elevate Chicago’s lowrider festival. More than just a car show, Slow & Low is a celebration of identity grounded in self-expression, social change, master craftsmanship, and machinery. The opportunity to take over Chicago’s largest tourist destination came with the responsibility of placemaking.

Collaborating with the event’s curators, Span designed a visual identity and exhibition graphics that foster a sense of belonging by celebrating the curators' dreams and the individuals of the community. Vivid, dimensional marigolds cascade across images from Slow & Low’s world-renowned and emerging photographers. Marigolds hold significance in Chicano and lowrider culture, symbolizing a celebration of faith, life, and death. The visual identity gains purpose by featuring Slow & Low’s photography, providing the design system with power by moving beyond showcasing stunning lowrider cars and highlighting the individuals in Slow & Low’s community. The juxtaposition of supergraphic flowers in the foreground of each designed item creates a dreamscape aesthetic.

In selecting our typographic palette, we drew inspiration from the cars, customizing Lucas Sharp and Wei Huang’s Respira, a typeface inspired by blackletter found in ancient manuscripts and the plaques within each lowrider. This choice pays homage to the omnipresent role of faith within the community. Complementing this is Miguel Reyes’s graceful Canela, a supportive typeface that, like lowriders, defies traditional classifications.

See also a post about the 2022 edition of this festival.

Slow & Low co-founders and co-curators Lauren M. Pacheco and Peter Kepha brought design studio Span in to build upon their history and vision by designing the event’s visual identity, promotion materials, and supergraphic environmental signage. More than a car show, Slow & Low is a celebration of identity grounded in self-expression, social-change, master-craftsmanship and machinery. The opportunity to take over Chicago’s largest tourist destination came with a responsibility of placemaking. Together, we did so by celebrating the individuals of a community that mainstream cultures often overlook.

Typographically, the design system employs a highly expressive, showroom approach. Span assembled a suite of typefaces mirroring letterforms found on the eye-catching cars, the chromed plaques of the car clubs, and masthead of the classic Teen Angels publication. The star of the showroom is the swash capitals of Frida Medrano’s Jabin – a contemporary evolution of the Gutenberg bible’s blackletter. Jabin’s curves and contrast are paired with Sharp Type’s dramatic Respira Black, a reprisal of 15th century Spanish blackletter. The supportive type is Archivio Tipografico’s version of Aldo Novarese’s Nova Augustea. This over-the-top, eclectic range of type is united in flamboyant beauty and in holding key roles in history. These qualities – beauty and history – are principles in the artistry and aesthetic of Lowrider culture.

Beyond letterforms, symbolically, the design system embraces an omnipresence of arches, marigolds, and praying hands – religious iconography important to Pacheco and Kepha given their prominence throughout Chicano and lowrider culture symbolizing a celebration of faith, life, and death. The visual identity comes to life with purpose by featuring Slow & Low’s world-renowned and emerging photographers. The photography gave the design system power, by going beyond showing the stunning, lowrider cars and spotlighting the individuals in Chicago’s lowrider community.