News

Apple Festival logo started as a sketch on kitchen table

By Bill Moss, Published: September 1, 2023

Digging up the story behind this year’s Apple Festival logo requires a journey halfway around the world.

If Adam Matteson had not returned to America from Shanghai with his wife, Yumeng Fu, earlier this year we would not have gotten the particular design festival leaders chose.

Matt Matteson, the Lightning’s Ask Matt columnist, noticed his daughter-in-law whipping up graphics on her laptop.

“One day they were sitting in my kitchen and I said, ‘Hey, why don’t you send a logo to the Apple Festival committee,’ and so she sent a couple of designs. That must have been late April. Apparently, the committee liked what she had.”

Fu, 33, had worked in Shanghai as an illustrator and graphic artist for a global company that teaches people English.

“We were just playing (with images), me and my husband,” she said. “My father-in-law said maybe you should do a sketch about it. I looked at logos for the previous years — Matt showed me those — and I got this idea, this theme. There’s always trucks, apple trees, landscape, so I just tried to combine all that together (to draw) a truck full of apples coming out of the landscape.”

With help from Matteson, she submitted three proposals. Weeks passed before someone called and said a festival committee had chosen her design. A designer at Vocational Solutions popped an apple tree onto a patch of green and made a few tweaks to adjust the logo for screen-printing.

Matteson recalled his daughter-in-law getting the email from the festival, asking

“‘Can we use it?’ and she said, ‘Yes’” and the rest is history.”