Buck Taylor Western Heritage Award

Frontier Texas honored Buck Taylor with its Western Heritage Award, recognizing his lifelong contribution to preserving and promoting the culture of the American West. Taylor is known to generations of audiences for his roles as Newly O’Brien in Gunsmoke, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson in Tombstone and Emmett Walsh in Yellowstone. Beyond acting, he is an accomplished Western artist whose paintings portray the people, animals and everyday experiences of ranch and cowboy life.

I developed the identity for the award and applied it across the event’s invitations and supporting collateral. The design needed to reflect Taylor’s career and personality while feeling authentic to Frontier Texas and the traditions the award celebrates. Rather than treating the event as a conventional recognition ceremony, the identity drew upon the visual language of Western craftsmanship and created something personal to the honoree.

The centerpiece of the project was a custom belt buckle created in collaboration with Texas-based Molly’s Custom Silver. Translating the identity into engraved metal allowed the award itself to become a lasting, functional piece of Western art. The buckle brought together illustration, typography and traditional silversmithing in an object closely connected to Taylor’s life and work.

The completed identity gave the event a consistent presence across every touchpoint, from the first invitation received by guests to the presentation of the buckle. The result was a tribute that celebrated Buck Taylor not only as an actor, but also as an artist and advocate for the heritage of the American West.