That football cover is a poster now.
We knew we had something special when we saw the initial artwork. The image had come from Dan Cosgrove, an illustrator and graphic designer in Chicago, on assignment from Kerry Prugh, the magazine’s art director.
Kerry had asked Dan to create the cover art for our summer issue celebrating the history of Notre Dame football. She had seen his work from ads, posters, packaging and annual reports for a long and impressive list of clients.
We liked the retro style. It had the right feel to convey the historic sense of Notre Dame’s football tradition, but with a sort of bright, new shine. We think Dan, with relatives who had graduated from Notre Dame, artistically rendered an image that captured the legacy and vitality of the sport the Irish played on the gridiron for decades.
We suspected the cover might have appeal as a poster, and the response we got from our readers when they saw the summer issue encouraged us to try. So Dan helped convert the magazine cover into a poster, and it’s now ready for sale and distribution.
You can order the 18-by-24 inch poster from this website. The $20 covers postage and handling, and posters will be shipped in sturdy tubes.
This is Notre Dame Magazine’s 11th poster, but it’s the first poster we did not initially offer as a premium for gifts to the magazine. We thought it a good idea to make the poster available during Notre Dame’s 125th football season. We hope our readers do, too.
The magazine has been making posters for our readers for more than 15 years now, and it started because of reader demand. Our Winter 1995-96 issue featured “The Doors of Notre Dame” on its back cover. The response was so great that we made a poster out of it and got permission to offer it in gratitude for contributions to the magazine.
People loved that poster and subsequent ones — such as the windows, statues, sentinels and residence halls as well as four depicting the various seasons on campus. The posters have typically featured the work of Matt Cashore ’94, now the University photographer. And after they have a run as a premium for donations to the magazine, they become available for sale.
We have a very limited supply of these, too, offered at this website for $10 each.
The posters have been a great venture for us. It’s fun to see them hanging on walls around campus and other spots in town. The reaction from readers has been especially gratifying; we like knowing they appreciate having them in their homes. And it’s been a welcome source of income for us — a magazine trying to keep pace with increasing costs of paper, postage and printing as well as the professional fees needed to do the magazine as well as we’d like — and the Notre Dame family expects.
So we hope you like this latest poster — something a little different in our efforts to meet our readers’ desires.
Kerry Temple is editor of Notre Dame Magazine. Email him at ktemple@nd.edu.