Meet the artist behind IU Football's iconic gameday posters
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Jon Terzini was just another broke college student at Indiana University when he stumbled across a flyer seeking a graphic artist for the athletics department in 2009.
Sixteen years later, Terzini’s distinctive crimson-colored, vintage-style football posters have become a defining piece of game day culture at IU. Students and townies alike hunt down the free posters strewn across town on gameday, and his designs have become collectors’ items, reselling for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
Terzini has been designing his signature spirit posters for every football game since he landed the gig in 2009. But it wasn’t until the fall of 2024 that his posters really started flying off the shelves.
“It’s changed dramatically,” Terzini said. “I couldn’t tell you how many messages I’ve gotten on social media, emails, that have said ‘I had no idea these things existed!’”
The Cignetti era changes everything: ‘Suddenly, we’re this good’
Gameday posters like Terzini’s date back to the 1800s, and in many cases are meant to be cocky and provocative.
From Florida’s Gator touting the skinned pelt of a Louisiana State Tiger to Duke’s Blue Devil taunting a Navy Goat, the classic posters show a home team pummeling the enemy with heavy-handed metaphor, regardless of a team’s likely odds at winning.
But in a basketball-first state and at a university with a historically not-so-great football program, Terzini’s fighting words of “Bully the Buckeyes” and “Stuff the Wolverine” didn’t always resonate. That was, until the Cignetti era.
“It’s definitely changed the exposure of my work,” Terzini said. “Suddenly, we’re this good, and people care, and they start paying attention.”
Terzini usually starts sketching his designs in the summer before the season starts, when the athletic department’s marketing team sends him a list of slogans and potential visual concepts. Back at the start of the 2024 season, Terzini didn’t know his calls for the Hoosiers to “Stomp the Spartans” and “Wallop the Wolverines” would be unusually prophetic.
But by last December, when the Hoosiers were headed to the College Football Playoffs for the first time in program, Terzini was glad to play into the Cignetti hype. For his Notre Dame poster, atop a graveyard of defeated opponents, Terzini drew a stern Cignetti declaring, “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
Getting into character: The return of the Bison brings new creative opportunities
In the early spring of this year, as the historic success of the 2024 season was reverberating through campus, Terzini received word of another pleasant surprise. After nearly six decades as a mascot-less black sheep, IU was bringing back the bison.
In seasons prior, Terzini had been relegated to using a generic football player with an IU-tridented helmet as a symbol for the Hoosiers. The return of the bison has given Terzini a character more in line with the other animal mascots in the Big 10 conference; not to mention, it’s allowed him to play with some fun visual metaphors, like the Indiana State poster where a grimacing bison helps Cignetti chop down a sycamore tree, a riff on the state seal.
“It opened up a lot of creative doors,” Terzini said.
Terzini said he’s excited to continue to hone his bison character in future designs, including his forthcoming poster for the Rose Bowl. He’s already prepared two variants for the Hoosiers’ matchup between either Alabama or Oklahoma. But either way, fans can expect a design themed around the “glam and glitz of Hollywood,” with Cignetti holding a director’s clapboard, the bison strutting down the red carpet, and Fernando Mendoza’s historic Heisman Trophy proudly on display.
You can try to find the poster on gameday in downtown Bloomington spots like the Upstairs Pub, Tracks and the Indiana Memorial Union. If you can’t find one, no worries; they’re sure to be up on eBay sooner or later.
Reach Brian Rosenzweig at brian@heraldt.com. Follow him on X/Twitter at @brianwritesnews.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Jon Terzini on IU Football spirit posters, Curt Cignetti season, Bison
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