New ride signage creates a park’s new theme
Thinking ahead lays the groundwork for a new project
By Dan Sawatzky
Posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2017

Even though our client has a fully built-out amusement park, which was founded in 1910, our recent project for them was very much like starting with a blank page. While the place now very much resembles a parking lot with rides, their exciting goal is to redesign and build a full-blast theme park over the next ten years, with a natural, park-like setting. That long-term goal is still very much in the planning stage but they added some new rides this year. They asked us to do the signs.
We encouraged them to take a longer view as we designed this year’s signs. Rather than do something that fits into the current “carny” style we wanted to design signs and features that will be appropriate for the future look of the themed park. The rides and signs they are currently installing will most likely be moved to a new location in the future. Our plan was to think of the future as we designed and built. We purposely designed things to be modular to facilitate easy moving later. It was our goal to raise the bar significantly and set the theme and style going forward.
We were tasked with the identification of two rides this year. The first was FlutterBye, which
we chronicled in a previous issue of SignCraft. The second, larger ride was dubbed Bug Whirled, a figure-eight, spinning, family coaster.
Dan Sawatzky's shop, Sawatzky's Imagination Corporation, is in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. Dan shares his experience in his Sign Magic Workshops on 3-D sign making, and his Sculpting Workshop.