The studio art alum behind those IU football posters

Meet Hoosier Football’s Poster Illustrator

by Samantha Stutsman

Source: My IU

Forget trading cards—Hoosier Football fans are collecting posters.

Before every game, IU Athletics drops roughly 2,000 vintage-style, red-and-white prints around Bloomington, and they’ve become serious collectors’ items.

The man behind the art? IU alum Jon Terzini, BFA’09, who’s been illustrating these game-day gems for nearly two decades. You might know him better by his Instagram handle: @terzink.

Back in 2009, while strolling through the halls of the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Terzini spotted a job posting on a bulletin board. IU Athletics was reviving a beloved campus tradition—the Hoosier Football spirit posters that first launched in 1976—and they needed an artist. As a lifelong Hoosier Football fan with a nearly empty bank account, Terzini didn’t need much convincing to throw his hat in the ring.

“I remember finding that [posting], taking it home, drawing [a poster] pretty quickly in a sketchbook, and sending it to the email address on the notice,” Terzini recalls. “They were like, ‘This is great, when can you start?’”

From then until now, Terzini hasn’t missed a single game—he’s illustrated every Hoosier Football poster since, all while keeping the faith that IU’s glory days were ahead.

“I’ve always been an IU football fan. My stepfather, who went to Purdue, would always take us to the Old Oaken Bucket games,” Terzini says. “I went to as many [games] as I could in college. Back then, 80 percent of the kids would be at the tailgate fields, and then the game would start, and nobody would go in. I didn’t really blame them.”

In 2009, Bill Lynch’s Hoosiers ended the season 4–8. These days, things look a lot brighter under head coach Curt Cignetti, whose squad is currently undefeated—and Terzini says it’s a huge privilege to see his artwork woven into the excitement.

“My friends don’t have another way of connecting with the university other than going to football games or donating,” he adds. “This is a way for me to stay in touch. It’s just an indescribable feeling how much fun it is to draw these [posters] and then see the Hoosiers win.”

The 2025 season marked the first time IU Athletics commissioned Terzini to design posters for every IU game, home and away. Planning for the upcoming season starts in the summer, when the marketing team creates slogans and visual concepts for each matchup. Terzini then aims to have every poster ready before the season’s opening kickoff.

In almost 20 years, Terzini’s work has hardly ever landed completely on the chopping block—usually only direction is to soften violent imagery or to address legal concerns.

“A few years ago, a Star Wars movie was coming out in theaters [during football season]. So, I drew up a Luke Skywalker-inspired IU football player with a lightsaber, who cuts off Darth Vader’s hand as he tries to throw a pass,” Terzini says. “[IU Athletics] said, ‘That’s not going to work. Disney’s going to sue the crap out of us.’”

The posters are all meant in good fun, and Terzini strives to keep the action on the page only semi-violent. In the 2025 season collection, the Indiana State poster was one of the milder ones, featuring Cignetti chopping down a Sycamore tree. The Michigan State design, on the other hand, showed the Hoosier bison spiking the head of a Spartan, while the Kennesaw State poster depicted the bison gripping an owl by the neck.

“We don’t want to be too friendly [with the image], but we don’t want anything too egregious. I always [tell Jon] to keep it close to PG/PG-13,” Carter Kincaid, BS’ 24, an associate director of marketing at IU Athletics, says.

Sponsored by IU Credit Union, the posters are free—but in very short supply. They’re distributed to local hotspots like the Upstairs Pub, The Indiana Shop, Alumni Hall, Homefield at Tracks, and the Indiana Memorial Union.

Now that the Hoosiers are performing well on the field, demand has soared, prompting IU Athletics to consider expanding distribution beyond Bloomington so alumni and fans outside the area can get their hands on them, too.

Terzini’s creations haven’t stayed confined to paper, either. For instance, the rally towel for the Hoosiers’ Sept. 12, 2025, matchup against Indiana State was inspired by his poster design.

“It was a very well received towel,” Kincaid says.

A scroll through Terzini’s past work on his Instagram page for Terz Inc.—the screen printing and apparel design company he founded in 2010—shows that no two posters are ever the same. Each season, Terzini and IU Athletics team up to craft fresh, distinctive designs, with extra attention given to the Big Ten matchups.

“Jon is spectacular to work with. He just gets it. There are very few people that I know that are as creative as Jon,” Kincaid says.

Each poster once took Terzini more than eight hours to complete, but these days he can finish one in about half that time. He starts each design on a drawing tablet, then moves it into Photoshop to fine-tune the details.

“I’ve gotten really, really good at drawing other people’s mascots,” he says, adding, “I love drawing Purdue Pete … and humiliating him. [It’s] always fun to mess with your biggest rival.”