Many people who grew up during the dawn of Internet games have tried their hand at digital design. Not all of them channeled it into a full-fledged career like Dan Polyak has.
The Chicagoland native and Andersonville-based artist has been designing work for music, drag and other entertainment communities for over a decade. In his latest Northalsted piece, he combines a number of different design styles in his first mural ahead of Election Day 2024.
Born and raised on the northwest side of Chicago, he describes himself as a “child of the Internet,” leading to his interest in graphic design. He’d play around on different design programs as he was growing up, giving him an affinity for visually creative projects.
In his late teens, he began designing for local pop punk bands, doing MySpace layouts and the like. It eventually blew up to him designing merchandise for bands like Fall Out Boy, Cobra Starship and more.
“I was that kid that was waiting in line at noon for a concert that didn’t start until 7:30, because I always wanted a good spot,” he said. “I think just over time, I really got an appreciation for music, and especially the pop punk era of bands. They were all so bold and colorful, and just really graphic-heavy.”
While studying for his undergraduate degree at Columbia College Chicago, he interned at Metro Chicago and was able to segue his experiences into a more permanent career in the industry. While at Metro, he discovered the queer drag world through its location above Smartbar.
Polyak had just graduated college and was longing for a community—a lot of his cis, straight women friends were getting married and on much different life tracks. One day, someone told him he should check out Smartbar’s weekly “Queen” if he was looking for more community, and a few of his drag queen friends encouraged him to attend.
He decided to go—and kept going. While there, he met a lot of up and coming queens—now some big names, such as Shea Couleé and Trixie Mattel—who needed graphic design. Now, he’s been attending “Queen” for over a decade.
Outside of his involvement in the drag design scene, Polyak has also continued to create merchandise for music artists. Some of his projects have been for stars such as David Guetta, Adam Lambert and Britney Spears.
His most recent project has taken a new form—a vinyl banner mural at Halsted Street and Cornelia Avenue, promoting voter registration in partnership with RuPaul’s Drag Race, World of Wonder, MTV, Northalsted and HeadCount. It’s his first-ever mural.
“I hit [my publicist] up one day and I was like, ‘I want to do a mural,’” he said. “I knew that there were ways to graphically create one without having to paint, there’s been so much evolution in tech and printing that I knew there was a way to make this happen.”
After he reached out to HeadCount, a non-profit pushing for voter registration and engagement, and they voiced interest, Polyak described a “snowball effect” beginning. They provided him with the text idea and gave him complete creative reign to do what he wanted.
He wants to leave viewers with an “aha moment” or just a simple moment of reflection in his work, and he wanted this project specifically to “activate people.” With the mural highlighting taking action in election year, it added an extra element—especially with so many hot-button issues affecting the queer community.
When designing the mural, Polyak wanted to touch on as many topics as possible while making it “approachable and cool, chic even,” and a piece that would “stop people in their tracks,” with a plethora of different design styles.
This particular piece will be up in Northalsted until Election Day. As for Polyak’s other work, he’s always working on other projects, some of his current ones including art pop-ups and dispensary designs. Chicago residents will be seeing quite a bit of his work in the near future.
“The biggest takeaway I would want [from my work] is just someone to be like, ‘Damn, that was a well-designed piece,’” he said. “I think, especially as queer people, we are so critical … I think my goal is to really just leave an impact that is like, ‘Okay, this person really thought about what they were doing.’”
