For the more than three million visitors to Cedar Point amusement park each year, this complex on the shores of Lake Erie in Sandusky, Ohio is the destination for fun, with enough rides, events, and shows to thrill those of all ages.
Parkgoers will also find signs of every size, shape, and description throughout the complex, guiding them, informing them of prices and policies, and promoting the many attractions that make Cedar Point such a perennially popular destination.
“In the average year, we probably do about 6,000 signs for the facility—everything from printed menus with pricing up to full dimensional signage,” says John Taylor, manager of graphic services for the park and parent corporation, Cedar Fair Entertainment Company. (Note: Taylor has been a member of the Cedar Point staff for thirty-five years now, starting out as an apprentice sign painter.)
Cedar Fair owns a total of eleven amusement parks, five water parks, and five hotels throughout the country. Taylor and his department are involved (directly or indirectly) in the design and/or production of signage and graphics for all the facilities.
Packed within Cedar Point’s sprawling 385 acres alone are an assortment of rides and roller coasters, four hotel facilities, the adjacent Soak City Water Park and Challenge Park destinations, a pair of miniature golf courses, fifty food locations, a state-of-the-art marina, and an RV campground.
Sign Design Central
As you might expect, keeping pace with the varied sign and graphics demands for Cedar Point alone is in itself a full-time job—yet there’s more. “It’s like we’re producing all the signs and graphics for a small town, as well as all the businesses there,” says Taylor. “We also work with the hotel industry, the food industry, the gaming industry, the merchandise industry, and all the attractions and shows.”
Taylor’s department handles design and coordinates production of all signage and graphics, producing what can be printed-in house digitally. Design work is handled by a pair of full-time graphic artists, Brian Kniceley and Adam Vavroch. They work on PCs in Adobe® Illustrator®, Photoshop®, and Gerber OMEGA™ OMEGA™ design software, as needed.
The range of materials used throughout the park for signage includes MDO plywood, HDU, PVC, and fabricated metals.
More complex CNC routing projects and awnings are all outsourced to area contractors and sign wholesalers. “We use a lot of awnings in the park at our restaurants, merchandise stands, and games complex,” he says. “Some of that requires direct digital printing to the awning fabric.
“So we’ll design the awnings but get others to create them.” (Note: Contractors also fabricate the awnings and support structures, but all installation is handled by Cedar Point’s staff.)
Some signs require following corporate guidelines, especially since some attractions in the park (such as the Planet Snoopy children’s area) are devoted to Peanuts© comic strip characters. “Certain safety signs and ADA signage also have to be standardized at the corporate level,” explains Taylor. “It’s much easier when you can centralize design and then coordinate production with the staff at each site.”
Painting & Printing
As far as in-house sign production goes, Taylor’s department relies on a combination of the old and the new. “We still use some hand-painted signs in the park, but most of those are in our ‘Frontier’ area [pictured, left], where its part of the traditional look,” says Taylor. “For other signs, we’ll employ airbrushing, spray-painting, and cut-vinyl letters.”
However digital printing is becoming a more integral component of their production process. As mentioned previously, contractors handle any direct digital printing to fabric, but Taylor and his staff design and output digital prints onto adhesive-backed vinyl and then apply them to cut PVC panels in-house. Digital printing is also employed for the sets used in the park’s shows and its popular Snoopy on Ice spectacular.
“Relatively few signs are completely digital prints—mainly posters, menus, window graphics, etc.,” notes Taylor, “but nearly all the signs contain digital print elements of some kind.”
For print production, the graphics department employs a fifty-four-inch Roland VersaCamm VS-540 eco-solvent printer they purchased last year. It’s their third large format printer. Taylor initiated the transition to digital more than ten years ago with a Roland CammJet CJ-5000, followed by a SOLJET. (Note: The department also has a thirty-inch Gerber vinyl plotter.)
“We all use the VersaCamm sporadically, but it’s chiefly operated by our resident painter, printer, and fabricator Maureen Bluhm,” says Taylor. “Digital printing is pretty much starting to take over more and more of our day-to-day work, because it can keep up with our pace and production requirements.”
Another advantage to digital printing is the variety and affordability of substrates that produce high-quality, durable images. Some signs, like those for souvenir merchandise and menu items, are likely to be updated frequently and need to only last one season. Others are intended as semi-permanent installations on the Cedar Point landscape and are likely to be in place for years.
In January, the graphics department was finalizing work on one such semi-permanent piece, a 20-by-13-foot welcome sign for Cedar Park’s new main entrance. At the same time, Taylor and his team were also putting finishing touches on signage for the food court areas and coordinating production with the other Cedar Fair facilities. “This year we have Coca-Cola® as a sponsor at all the parks, so the restaurants all have to be re-themed,” he says.
Taylor’s department has been exploring the possibilities for digital printing on a range of print media from Kapco, LexJet, and ORACAL. In fact, they print to new materials every day. “We also print on canvas for our offices, where they want the print to look like a painting,” reports Taylor. “We also print on wallpaper substrates for walls and murals in the park’s restaurants and hotels.”
In addition to his staff, Taylor can also draw on the talents of a dedicated paint department and the park’s building crews for installations. “We’ll get many of our substrates primed and ready from them,” he says.
Seasonal Projects
There’s always another project waiting in queue. “Since we’re a seasonal operation, our [workflow] changes throughout the year,” says Taylor. “The first five weeks of the year we’re usually working on the smaller signs for the parks.
“Then in spring, we’ll work on the sets for the live outdoor shows.”
As summer nears, they look ahead toward fall and the graphics that overtake Cedar Point for its “Halloweekend” celebrations running from September through the end of the park’s season in late October. Halloween-themed directional signage, wallcoverings, and graphics for the park’s eleven haunted houses (as well as the make-up for their ghouls) are all the responsibility of Taylor’s graphics department. “It’s a blast and something that’s become more and more popular each of the sixteen years we’ve been doing it,” he says.
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No matter what the shop is working on, the park offers the kind of creative challenges that always keeps the jobs interesting and fun. “One day we might be designing a ’50s-style restaurant, and the next day, we might be doing sets for a show or a sign for one of our rides,” says Taylor.
For example, they’re currently working on a sign for The Gatekeeper, the park’s newest roller coaster. The track for this winged roller coaster will soar above the entrance, and its sign will combine a fabricated metal cabinet encasing sculpted lettering highlighted with gold foil.
“I’ve had an opportunity to work with some really talented people,” says Taylor, “and I’ve learned something from them all.”
—Mike Antoniak
