{"id":544742,"date":"2026-03-25T17:23:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T17:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/544742\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T17:23:18","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T17:23:18","slug":"the-illustrator-behind-chicago-neighborhood-posters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/544742\/","title":{"rendered":"The illustrator behind Chicago neighborhood posters"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve ever seen a poster from the 1930s promoting one of America\u2019s national parks, created at the behest of the Works Progress Administration, then you have a good idea of the kind of tourism-style posters the illustrator and graphic designer Steve Shanabruch has created for a number of Chicago neighborhoods and landmarks.<\/p>\n

They are visually striking, with bold lines and vivid colors. The poster for Englewood features the sunny atrium of the yellow brick residential Yale Building. The poster for Norwood Park features the distinctive, colorful exterior of the Superdawg drive-in hot dog stand. His latest is a poster for Wicker Park featuring a Blue Line \u201cL\u201d train.<\/p>\n

Shanabruch has no affiliation with any city agency. His impetus to draw these posters \u2014 which are available for sale on his website<\/a> \u2014 is self-driven.<\/p>\n

The project began 15 years ago with a simpler concept: Creating logos for Chicago neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hated my job,\u201d says Shanabruch. \u201cI was a designer with a sales company and I just wasn\u2019t being challenged creatively. So it was just a personal project to fulfill my creative needs. I started the logos of neighborhoods and community areas in 2011.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shanabruch is originally from Chicago. He grew up in Beverly.<\/p>\n

\u201cChicago and Chicago history is ingrained in my blood. My father started the Chicago Bungalow Association for the city and ran it from its infancy. So the city\u2019s idiosyncrasies have always appealed to me. I think that\u2019s probably true for any designer or creative person.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A poster of Wicker Park created by artist Steve Shanabruch for his Chicago Neighborhoods project. (Steve Shanabruch)<\/p>\n

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A poster of Englewood created by artist Steve Shanabruch for his Chicago Neighborhoods project. (Steve Shanabruch)<\/p>\n

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A sample of the Starsiak font by Steve Shanabruch. (Steve Shanabruch)<\/p>\n

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Artist Steve Shanabruch sorts some of his neighborhood prints at his Chicago home on March 9, 2026. (Brian Cassella\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n

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A poster of Norwood Park created by artist Steve Shanabruch for his Chicago Neighborhoods project. (Steve Shanabruch)<\/p>\n

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A poster featuring the Chicago Stock Exchange trading room created by Steve Shanabruch for Preservation Chicago’s 2026 Chicago 7 Most Endangered. (Steve Shanabruch\/Preservation Chicago)<\/p>\n

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A sample of the Comiskey font by Steve Shanabruch. (Steve Shanabruch)<\/p>\n

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A poster of the Chicago Cultural Center created by artist Steve Shanabruch for his Chicago Neighborhoods project. (Steve Shanabruch)<\/p>\n

Show Caption<\/p>\n

1 of 8<\/p>\n

A poster of Wicker Park created by artist Steve Shanabruch for his Chicago Neighborhoods project. (Steve Shanabruch)<\/p>\n

Expand<\/a><\/p>\n

He began by creating three logos a week.<\/p>\n

\u201cI used to wander a lot more before I had a child,\u201d he says of his inspirations. The logos were \u201cbased on personal experience with those neighborhoods\u201d and imagery that felt representative.<\/p>\n

The Humboldt Park logo features the Puerto Rican flag arch on Division Street. The Hyde Park logo features the stained glass from Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Robie House. The Kenwood logo has an Art Deco graphic from the Powhatan Apartment building. The New City logo (an area that encompasses Back of the Yards) features a pig, referencing the neighborhood\u2019s history as the site of slaughterhouses. The logo for South Chicago features a car that looks like it\u2019s speeding up a ramp, which is a reference to \u201cThe Blues Brothers\u201d movie when the Bluesmobile jumps the partially raised 95th Street Bridge.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, Shanabruch says, people would reach out about using the logos. \u201cI was actually just driving through Bowmanville and saw it on a banner and I was like, oh man, I forgot that I said they could do that!\u201d<\/p>\n

After a year or so, he burned out on logos. That is what led him to the next iteration of the project with neighborhood posters. He owns a copy of one of those old WPA National Parks posters, and looking at it one day, he thought: That could be fun if I focus on various Chicago neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust based on doing the logos, it became obvious that people have so much pride in their neighborhoods,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s a nice way to feature neighborhoods that don\u2019t ever get featured. There\u2019s a lot of Chicago art out there, but so much of it is based on downtown or the lakefront or any of the hip neighborhoods. But somebody in North Lawndale? They\u2019re probably happy they live there and would appreciate seeing it represented on a poster. I\u2019ve been selling these since 2012, so I know if a certain neighborhood poster is not going to sell. But I\u2019ll still do it because one, it\u2019s creatively fulfilling, and two, it\u2019s really important for people to be seen. Every neighborhood is important, even if it gets dumped on by the media. And I want to create art that celebrates the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, Shanabruch lives in Portage Park. And the Portage Theater is featured prominently in the posters. That feels intuitive. Some of the posters are more counterintuitive. Rogers Park, for example, features the Madonna Della Strada chapel on the campus of Loyola University.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not religious, I have no ties to Loyola. But I\u2019m doing this mainly for creative fulfillment and I love Art Deco and wanted to draw that Art Deco church. But I\u2019ve also learned that my posters featuring churches don\u2019t sell well.\u201d<\/p>\n

What began as an informal side project now makes up half of Shanabruch\u2019s income. In addition to his website, his art is sold around town, including the Willis Tower Skydeck gift shop. He quit his job more than a year ago and now also works with clients on a freelance basis. When Preservation Chicago released its list of endangered sites last week, Shanabruch was hired to draw a poster featuring a column from the Chicago Stock Exchange trading room floor, currently housed at the Art Institute.<\/p>\n

He estimates that he\u2019s done around 60 neighborhoods so far.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never plan it out. I do it on a whim,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I really want to do Irving Park, because I get a ton of requests for that. But usually it\u2019s because I\u2019m driving through a neighborhood and I\u2019ll be like, \u2018Oh, man, I haven\u2019t been here in a long time,\u2019 and then I\u2019ll start to notice things and usually that inspires me. It\u2019s definitely serendipitous.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then draws the posters on an iPad. Some years, he\u2019s released 10 or 11 prints. Sometimes it\u2019s just five or six, \u201cdepending on my workload and what\u2019s going on in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shanabruch has also added a third element to the project: Fonts based on signage around town. The newest is inspired by the iconic Pride Cleaners building in the Chatham neighborhood, which recently announced that it is closing. All the fonts can be downloaded for free.<\/p>\n

\"ArtistArtist Steve Shanabruch works on a new piece at his Chicago home on March 9, 2026. (Brian Cassella\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom neon signs to letters sculpted into a building\u2019s facade, Chicago has a long history of amazing signage,\u201d he says on his website<\/a>. \u201cSo many of these signs have been lost over the years, but I have found a way to preserve what we still have and commemorate what we have lost through an ever-expanding roster of signage-inspired fonts.\u201d<\/p>\n

He calls one of the fonts Comiskey and it\u2019s based on a photo of the ballpark stadium that he guesses is from the 1960s or \u201970s. The letters have spurs on them, giving the font an almost country-western look. \u201cThe White Sox were quirky back then.\u201d There\u2019s another called Tap Room, based on the signage of the Lincoln Tap Room in Lakeview.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a trained typographer, but the first one I did was Starsiak, which was on the Starsiak Clothing building on Milwaukee and Division and I just wanted to recreate that. So I made all 26 letters and 10 numbers and punctuation and then made a font file. And I was like, well, that was a fun challenge. So I just started making them, and then people started sending me pictures saying, \u2018Hey, you should make a font of this one.\u2019 Some of them are iconic signs, some of them aren\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says he finds himself working on fonts when he\u2019s supposed to be focused on something else.<\/p>\n

\u201cI call it procrasti-working. I\u2019m being productive, just not on the thing I\u2019m supposed to be productive on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fonts are free to download.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t care how people use them, as long as they\u2019re not using them for Trump ads or ICE stuff. I guess I can\u2019t control that, but that\u2019s my preference. I was in Edgewater Candles the other day and they gave me a shirt of theirs because it had one of my fonts on it. It was awesome. And then I saw someone used one of my fonts for album artwork and I thought, hey, that\u2019s cool. So it\u2019s fun to see \u2014 that\u2019s why I put them out there for free. The low self-esteem designer in me is like, nobody would pay for these, so I might as well just get them out there. I made them, so why not let people use them?\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, the prints on Shanabruch\u2019s website are not free. But the price \u2014 $28 per poster \u2014 isn\u2019t outlandish.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the thing, I want the posters to be accessible,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s nice because some people will leave Chicago and they\u2019ll buy five or six of them to represent all the neighborhoods they\u2019ve lived in so they can still have that memory.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, it\u2019s exciting any time anyone says they like my art. Obviously, people buy it, but it\u2019s still astounding to me that people like the stuff I make.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019ve ever seen a poster from the 1930s promoting one of America\u2019s national parks, created at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88,3803,2558,2628],"class_list":["post-544742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-keywee","tag-latest-headlines","tag-things-to-do"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}