October 25, 2019 Pumpkins on Porches: Students Create Jack o’lantern Templates for Families

Families in Knoxville and beyond will be displaying the design creativity of some of our students this Halloween.  In fact, we’ll be on the front porches of many homes.

Students in our American Institute of Architecture Students organization designed 24 Jack o’lantern templates for the Knoxville News Sentinel, who is sharing the downloadable templates with everyone.

The template designs are themed with University of Tennessee, Knoxville, state of Tennessee, Great Smoky Mountains and Halloween, and they include levels of complexity from very easy to quite difficult.

See and download the templates!

This project started in August when the Sentinel asked to partner with a group at UT to design the templates. AIAS enthusiastically volunteered.

“AIAS looks for ways to engage with the community through architecture and design,” said Jonathan Winfiele, fifth-year Architecture student and UT AIAS president. “When this opportunity arose, we were immediately sold on helping with the design to contribute to the Knoxville community.”

To ensure they were on the right track with the template designs, the group did a test-carve in early October with great results.

“The pumpkin designing was a great way to create fun graphics that have a practical purpose,” said Grace Madden, second-year Architecture student. “It was also nice to do something that people in the community can enjoy and use in their Halloween decorations.”

Some might be surprised that students studying architecture could produce such unusual designs. We, on the other hand, are not at all surprised. The creative culture in the college is beyond the disciplines we teach; the creativity of our students extends even to pumpkins on porches.

“This was a perfect way to practice the visual communication of our design work,” Winfiele said. “How do we lay out the design on the page? How do we make complexity look simple? We got to practice design through different mediums that we usually don’t get to use.”

To use the Jack o’lantern templates, simply visit the KNS site, download the templates of your choice for free, transfer the image onto your pumpkin, carve, add a light and enjoy!

Happy Halloween!