This article is featured in the 2025 Winter Carnival Special Issue.
Winter Carnival offers several notable icy traditions, from the polar plunge in the freezing waters of Occom Pond, to the ice sculpture contest, in which teams of contestants carve a sculpture out of a 100-pound frozen block. But one tradition doesn’t involve braving the cold at all: the poster competition. This year, Yujie Pan ’27 designed the winning poster for the 115th Winter Carnival, themed “Jurassic Parka: The Carnival Before Time.”
According to Bryan Smith, owner of Records, Posters & Memorabilia — Main Street’s 22-year-old poster institution — Winter Carnival posters hold a rich history, dating back to their debut in 1911 for the College’s second annual Winter Carnival.
Posters have been a Winter Carnival promotional tool since the festival’s early years. Walter Beach Humphrey, a member of the Class of 1914 who designed the inaugural poster, favored a cream and green color scheme, depicting a man airborne during a ski jump. Although the second poster was not created until 1935, according to Smith, the decades since have featured illustrated designs ranging from Dartmouth-themed Dr. Seuss scenes to a 1962 parody of the “West Side Story” poster.
Aside from designing the posters, students also play a role in elevating the ultimate poster design. Since at least the 1940s, the winning poster has been selected by the Winter Carnival Council, a group of students responsible for presiding over the weekend’s events as well as the selection of the poster and t-shirt design, according to Winter Carnival Council co-chair Kennedy Wiehle ’25.
However, the people behind the posters — including both the designers and contest judges — have not always been the same.
According to the 2010 book “Winter Carnival: A Century of Dartmouth Posters,” the poster contest previously allowed submissions from design schools, such as the Pratt Institute, in addition to those from Dartmouth students, until 1942. After a “war-time hiatus” from 1943 to 1946, “the tradition of using only Dartmouth students as artists was firmly established,” with the exception of a few alumni who designed posters after graduating, according to the book. As for the judges, the 1963 poster contest included Dartmouth faculty members as judges, in addition to members of the Winter Carnival Council, according to a 1962 announcement for the contest.
This year, “close to 30” poster designs were submitted to the contest, each presenting their own take on the year’s theme, Wiehle said.
“There’s a certain weight to [selecting the poster] because this is going to be hanging on the staircase [in the Collis Center] for hundreds of years,” Winter Carnival Council co-chair Noah da Silva ’25 said. “So the poster is honestly the main stamp of legacy to bring to the Winter Carnival.”
For this year’s celebration, da Silva and Wiehle suggested a dinosaur theme — an homage to their shared love of the subject.
“Kennedy loves dinosaurs, I’m a paleontologist — we’ve been best friends since freshman year, and we were like, ‘Alright let’s do it,’” da Silva said.
Although poster designers are now required to follow a theme, such as this year’s dinosaur theme, such restrictions only began during the 1960s — previously, the posters typically depicted winter sports, Smith said.
After choosing the theme, da Silva and Wiehle parsed through the poster submissions to find the perfect design — ultimately landing on Pan’s depiction of a nighttime scene filled with snowy trees. In it, a parka-adorned Dartmouth student faces off against a tyrannosaurus rex emerging in front of the Baker Library tower.
To crown their winner, Wiehle and da Silva kept thematic and design elements in mind, looking for a poster that “integrate[d] the theme with Dartmouth itself,” Wiehle said.
“‘Will people want this? Do we want to have this on our walls?’” da Silva asked.
Pan’s poster checked the boxes — the Council loved the art style and aesthetics of the design, noting that it was well suited to hang “on someone’s wall,” da Silva said. The winning poster also captured the College’s rich identity, he added.
“Dartmouth was the focus,” da Silva said. “We saw Baker Tower, we saw the trees, we saw winter.”
While winning posters adorn the walls of many Dartmouth students’ rooms, few see the actual work that goes into the design. Pan spent “around five to six hours” perfecting her art on her iPad — a process she was willing to undertake twice.
Pan explained that she also submitted a Winter Carnival poster design in 2024 but was not ultimately crowned. She knew she wanted to try her hand again this year — no matter the theme — but was particularly excited by the idea of dinosaurs.
“When I knew [the theme was] Jurassic Park, I was like, ‘Yes!’” Pan said. “There’s so much inspiration for it.”
Her inspiration and dedication ultimately paid off. Pan said that winning this year felt like “redemption time,” and designing the art was a “dream.”
“It’s definitely such an honor to win the competition,” she added.
Now, Pan’s design will join a long history of winning posters — and may even show up in Records, Posters & Memorabilia or on a dorm wall in 20 years as a piece of vintage decor.
Smith said he began accumulating Winter Carnival posters in 2008 after receiving requests from interested alumni. In the years since, the store has established a reputation for its collection — and Smith has become a library of Winter Carnival poster knowledge, he added.
“If anyone has [a Winter Carnival poster], they call me,” he said. “If people have them and they want them appraised, they call me.”
Although people can purchase reprints of Winter Carnival posters from the Co-Op store and website, Records, Posters & Memorabilia only stocks originals, Smith added.
According to Smith, the tradition reflects evolving artistic and cultural trends, as designs transitioned from hand-drawn to primarily digital beginning in 2014.
Even as trends evolve, Smith said the key to a defining Winter Carnival poster is “simplicity of design,” with the use of color also playing a crucial role in determining a poster’s long-lasting popularity.
In “Winter Carnival: A Century of Dartmouth Posters,” author and design historian Steven Heller commented that the artistic evolution of the posters reflects the different eras in which they were each created.
“Like clothing, posters are fairly accurate indicators of time and place,” Heller wrote.
The current era, and the technology that has come to shape art and design, are reflected in this year’s poster — which was made on the digital art platform Procreate, according to Pan. Inspiration to utilize digital tools hit Pan after her positive experiences in COSC 122, “3D Digital Modeling” and COSC 123, “AR/VR Design and Development.” Pan realized that she wanted to pursue digital arts as a career and is proposing a special major in digital arts, which is currently only offered as a minor.
Pan — who received a $500 prize sponsored by the Dartmouth Co-Op for her winning design — said she is “looking forward” to her work entering the historical collection, though she also hopes to hang one closer to home.
“Maybe I’ll get one for my room,” she said.
According to general manager Don Powers, the Dartmouth Co-Op, founded in 1919, has been around almost as long as Winter Carnival itself and enjoys the opportunity to continue to support the campus tradition.
“The Dartmouth Co-Op always looks for ways to connect with Dartmouth students and sponsor fun events like Dartmouth Winter Carnival,” Powers said.
Although only one design could claim victory, the Council looked for ways to incorporate other submitted designs into the Winter Carnival weekend, such as on stickers or the Winter Carnival t-shirt, according to da Silva.
“We do have a lot of talented submissions,” Wiehle said. “It’s not ever an obvious answer.”
The poster will be available for purchase at Collis, the Co-Op and Records, Posters & Memorabilia.
Yujie Pan ’27 has published a cartoon in The Dartmouth. She was not involved in the writing or production of this article.
