Theme Park Brand | M. Crozier Portfolio

Theme Park Brand & Logo Design

2025 (ongoing project)

Recently I took part in a three week long design sprint through my online design course subscription. Week 2 Brief: Design a logo and brand style guide for a fictional theme park opening in Budapest, inspired by the style of director Wes Anderson. Final deliverables to include were: * The full name: Wes World * An illustration to represent theme park e.g Ferris Wheels, RollerCoasters * Unify elements of logo without using an actual border or frame (avoid large white spaces and establish a clear bounding box). * Use striking pastel colours * Include process work

For this project I didn't use AI tools to create the logo (although we were shown a few vector illustration AI tools like Recraft, which could potentially help with elements for the logo). I instead used AI tools to create cohesive mock up images to display the concepts. It saved me hours of scrolling to find suitable mock ups that also match. After that, all I had to do was use Photoshop for warping, perspective and displacement maps to get the realistic touch. The biggest challenge was actually to do with my original logo ideas. There were some sketches that I and the instructor thought would be great to try out but when I started to put them together in Illustrator they felt too flat, not capturing the Wes Anderson "quirkiness".

Instead, I went back to my drawing roots and decided to keep it simple by sketching a single theme park symbol using the pencil tool in Illustrator. I kept the large stylised W from one of my sketched ideas and used it the contain parts of the illustration and give contrast against it. While I liked how this turned out, the result was too serious for a theme park. Perhaps more suited to a bank or private club in London. I think the large W from the logo worked well when I mocked the design up on AI generated images. However, the illustration of the carousel horse lost a good amount of clarity and impact on the mockups. This could possibly be solved by increasing the line thickness, reducing some of the complex details, or both.

I'm planning to re-try this design but with a more whimsical styled horse (with a simpler form and thicker stroke) to see if that adds the right tone to the design. I also want to retry one of my earlier sketches (see slideshow below) now that I know I can achieve a more hand drawn effect with the pencil tool and now that I've seen potential issues that can occur when mocking the design up. One last option that I'm excited to try is to use the current logo (with a few clarifying improvements) and mock up a different brand identity for a separate target audience. I think I could create an interesting concept for an "adults-only theme park", with a mature carnival theme, cocktail promotions and a neon lights club style. I'm interested to see how the reverse process goes with using an existing logo to inform a whole new brief.

Click here to see my logo design process for this project

Click here to see the logo style guide PDF in full

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