Graphic design · Case study
Ghosts of the past, on a walking tour.
A 16-page booklet and poster series for YSU’s self-guided Haunted History Walking Tour, built on real ghost stories from campus history.
Context
What the tour is
The Haunted History Walking Tour is a campus event built around true ghost stories tied to university landmarks. Guests walk Wick Avenue after dark and stop at the buildings the stories belong to.
What I did
I led the design of the 16-page booklet guests read as they walked, along with the posters and signage that promoted the event across campus.
The brief was a list of stories and a date. Everything the tour looked like came out of the archive research.
Final artifacts
Printed, folded, and handed out
One system across three formats: the booklet guests carried, the poster that filled the campus boards, and the A-frame that stood outside Kilcawley on the night.
Poster · booklet spread · A-frame signage
Key moments
It started in the archive
After the brief, I went looking for the real stories behind the tour. My supervisor shared a YSU library archive link, and I searched old newspapers and university records from twenty and thirty years back.
Reading those articles is what set the tone. The typography, the engraving-style illustration, even the colour came out of what those pages already looked like. The research picked the direction, not me.
Drawn, then set for print
I built the cover, the page layouts and the styles in Illustrator, hand-drew the map for the back cover, and assembled the whole thing in InDesign for print.
What I kept going back and forth on was readability against theme. It had to be spooky enough to be worth carrying, and plain enough to follow while walking, at night, in October.
Reflection
This was the first thing I designed that people physically held. Print has no undo: once 250 copies are on the table, a 3mm margin error is 250 margin errors.
It taught me more about print production, bleed and accessibility than any brief since. It also taught me how to work inside real constraints without flattening the idea.
Impact
250+ booklets printed and handed out on the night. The posters ran across campus in the run-up, and the booklet is the piece of mine that has been in the most hands.