Discovering Northwest Indiana.

• Author: Potempa, Philip
• Position: Poster campaign to promote tourist industry - Cover Story

The South Shore Line's 70-year-old poster campaign is revived to promote the region.

Call it history repeating itself. In the mid-1920s, colorful posters celebrating life in Northwest Indiana began appearing in downtown Chicago. Some touted the region's dunes and lakeshore beaches. Others focused on the burgeoning steel industry.

The South Shore Line railroad commissioned 50 of these posters, which were designed to promote Northwest Indiana as a destination. Railroad officials hoped the poster campaign would ultimately convince more Chicagoans to relocate to Northwest Indiana.

Fast forward to today. Northwest Indiana is once again trying to lure new residents and visitors with the help of posters. Today's posters sport the look and feel of yesteryear but emphasize the region's modern-day attributes.

The release of new poster designs is part of a $1 million campaign by the Northwest Indiana Forum to highlight what the organization's leaders call "the Indiana region's new reality." The Forum, the region's economic-development agency for Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Starke, Newton, Jasper and Pulaski counties, held a news conference June 10th at the Chicago Cultural Center to unveil the initial five paintings, the first of a series of 50.

Thirty posters supporting the "Discover Northwest Indiana" promotional campaign already have been sponsored and commissioned and will be released to the public throughout the year. John Davies, vice president of marketing for the Forum, says several people at his organization decided it was time to resurrect the South Shore posters.

"Just like the old posters, we are once again using artwork to show the wonders of Indiana, both natural and man-made," Davies says. "One of the goals in updating the new poster series was to make sure the in, ages used were caught up with the reality of the landscape of Indiana today."

Mitch Markovitz, art director for the project and creator of several of the new posters, says he's been dreaming about a project to revive the South Shore Line posters for the past 20 years. "The posters are a great way for people to see Northwest Indiana and what we have to offer, both the beauty and the people."

Markovitz says he worked closely with all the artists involved to assure the new series of posters would preserve the original "look and style" of the series that graced Chicago in the 1920s.

"The posters may have a look that is very simplistic, but they are not all that easy to do," Markovitz...