Be sure to watch "Mission Amusement" tonight, July 1st, on the Travel Channel, at 10 PM EST, featuring Conneaut Lake Park. FASTSIGNS® had the privilege to work with this historic park—read on to learn more about how we helped update their signs and graphics.
Conneaut Lake Park is a family-friendly, historic amusement park located on the western side of Conneaut Lake in Pennsylvania. The park and the property surrounding it offers two dozen rides, a boardwalk, a gift shop, food stands, a hotel and a camping site.
The park opened in 1892 and many of the rides in place today were installed decades ago. The most famous ride is the Blue Streak roller coaster, which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary. With the need to repair and update signs throughout the park, Lisa Rawson, the park's Marketing Manager, entered the 2012 FASTSIGNS® MetamorphoSIGN contest in hopes to win the $10,000 makeover category.
The Challenge
Conneaut Lake Park is working toward revitalizing itself. Recovering from a past fire and struggling with the economy, the park rallied support from their visitors and the community to vote for their contest entry, and won the $10,000 FASTSIGNS makeover. The volunteer board of trustees met with FASTSIGNS to discuss their makeover needs and ideas. With the park's great background, Conneaut Lake Park wanted to maintain its rich history while attracting new visitors, building business with repeat visitors and making the park a destination of choice for events and vacation-goers.
The Solution
FASTSIGNS worked with Conneaut Lake Park to gradually repair, revamp and update some of the park's signage, while maintaining the historic feel.
The sign most visible from the highway had been damaged and rusted over the years. The three-part electrical cabinet sign is the first sign visitors and potential future visitors see, so it needed to excite people passing by, and to clearly reflect the image of the park as an inviting, historical and fun getaway. To achieve this, FASTSIGNS refaced the existing sign cabinets, and updated some of the internal electrical pieces. Refreshing the highway electrical sign meant keeping the same shape and typeface so visitors who have been coming to the park for years could still identify it. The bottom part of the sign was given an updated changeable reader board, which made updating the copy box it easier for park employees to update messages and promote events.
The wooden sign at the entrance of the park's Midway had seen a notable amount of wear-and-tear over the years. FASTSIGNS installed a new electrical sign with three interchangeable panels and graphics. Preserving the size and feel of the original wooded signage, the colors and typestyle were updated to making it more appealing to visitors.
FASTSIGNS also provided wayfinding signs to help visitors better navigate the park. In addition to the wayfinding map, there are two panels, above and below, that can be switched and updated when needed. The park uses these directional display panels to sponsor advertisements from local businesses, to help with revenue.
In celebrating the 75th anniversary of the park's famous roller coaster, the Blue Streak, FASTSIGNS designed and provided Conneaut Lake Park with comprehensive visual solutions to promote the celebration around the park, including promoting it on the highway sign-panel, on pavement graphics and on multiple weather-durable banners. "The 75th anniversary logo that was created for all the Blue Streak signage is great; it kept our original logo and dressed it up just right for this year," Lisa said.
The Results
With the new and refreshed signage, the park is now better able to show visitors its unique character and history in an attractive way. In addition to the $10,000 prize from the national FASTSIGNS® MetamorphoSIGN contest, FASTSIGNS of Erie, who designed and installed the signs, contributed an additional $10,000 toward the revitalization project. "They were outstanding to work with," Lisa explained. "It means so much for visitors to see the results of their votes; I think it gives them a sense of pride in our park."
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