Toledo Zoo Billboard Project

Given the option of The Toledo Zoo, The Imagination Station, and Mercy/ St. Vincent Hospital, I chose to create billboards for The Toledo Zoo.  I thought that it would be fun to target an audience of children and implement bright colors and fun images of animals.  I looked up images of other zoo billboards for inspiration.  Some of them I really liked, while others of them I was not crazy about.  The images are found below:

The Philadelphia Zoo and San Diego Zoo billboards (1st and 3rd photos) were my favorite designs.  I also like how the Australia Zoo (last photo) uses an extension, which I will be doing for my project.

I came up with various ideas for my billboard theme.  Here are my thumbnail sketches:

The two designs that I liked best are shown below in my preliminary sketches:

I plan to implement the first design shown in my preliminary sketches and switch out the animals of an elephant, lion, and giraffe.  To catch people’s attention, I want to use extensions of the animals’ limbs.  I also plan to implement a different bright color as the background of each billboard design.  These colors will be especially appealing for children.  I also plan to design a very light, subtle pattern into the bright colors of the background to add a little more visual appeal for viewers.

For my smaller sign for print production, I plan to do something very similar to the billboard ideas, just on a smaller scale.  I think this design would be effective on a large or small canvas.  I am excited to see how the printed piece turns out.