The Chicago International Film Festival is one of the world’s longest-running and most respected film festivals. To mark its 60th anniversary, we set out to celebrate the breadth of its legacy — not with nostalgia alone, but with a visual system that treated cinema itself as the storytelling medium.

At the heart of the campaign was a simple yet powerful idea: using the number 60 as a cinematic storytelling device. Inspired by film aspect ratios, the 6 was constructed to reflect 35mm film, while the 0 echoed the proportions of widescreen formats. Together, they became a window into the festival’s history — literally framing film within film.

We meticulously explored the festival’s archive of more than 14,000 films, selecting frames that could live inside the numerals and speak to six decades of storytelling.

Each poster paired visually striking moments from unlikely film combinations across different eras of the festival. Though separated by time, genre, or geography, the scenes were united by shared themes — emotion, tension, intimacy, rebellion.

These pairings invited audiences to rediscover films they love while uncovering connections to stories they may never have seen. The posters appeared across Chicago, taking over high-traffic streets, transit locations, and cinema spaces, turning the city itself into an open-air gallery of film history.

The “60” device evolved beyond posters into a bespoke typographic system, extending the idea of film-as-form across the entire identity. The custom typeface carried the same cinematic DNA, allowing imagery and typography to work together as one expressive language.

From festival guides and merchandise to outdoor media and digital touchpoints, the typeface helped unify the campaign — grounding everything in the visual logic of cinema.

Beyond print and outdoor executions, the campaign expanded into motion. A theatrical trailer stretched and animated the typographic system to showcase films by genre, transforming the identity into a dynamic storytelling tool.

Together, the posters, typography, and film executions paid homage to the festival’s rich past while looking forward — celebrating not only the films that defined the last 60 years, but also the countless stories still waiting to be discovered.