Cravens creates children’s zoo identity

London Zoo is set to launch a new identity, designed by Cravens, for its Children’s Zoo, which it is renaming Animal Adventure.

Cravens’ branding will feature ‘a very simple logo in a playful, childish font that will sit well with our photographic poster campaigns’, says the zoo’s brand executive Owen Croft.

The Zoological Society of London briefed Cravens in October to create a new identity and marketing materials that would appeal to parents of children aged three to seven.

Cravens has worked as ZSL’s primary design and marketing group for the past four years, and has produced several logos and marketing campaigns rendered in a hyper-real style for exhibitions at the zoo.

Croft reports that ZSL hopes to approve the new branding in the coming week. It will unveil the new identity to the public in the build-up to the relaunch of the children’s zoo, which the ZSL’s regular architect Wharmby Kozdon is remodelling.

London Zoo project manager Ian Fitzgerald reveals that the new enclosure will feature several zones that allow children to view animals on their level. These include a ‘tree zone’ of walkways through the tree canopy, a ‘root zone’with underground tunnels and Perspex bubbles that allow visitors to ‘pop-up’ into the enclosure, and a watery ‘splash zone’.

‘The designers that work on the spaces in the zoo can feel their creativity is a little constrained,’ admits Fitzgerald. ‘While we don’t have an internal design team, we do come up with the concepts ourselves, as they have to take account of animal welfare.’

The London Children’s Zoo was founded in 1938, and was last redesigned during the early 1990s, also by Wharmby Kozdon.

Animal Adventure will open to the public in April.