Rolly Crump: The Architect of Delight

Illustration for Los Angeles Magazine by Kevin Kidney & Jody Daily,  March 2011

Rolly Crump is one of our favorite designers in the whole wide world. Whether we're talking about his theme park contributions for Disney, or his satyrical counter-culture posters, Rolly rules.

A few years ago Los Angeles Magazine asked us to create an illustration to accompany an article about the legendary artist, and of course we were thrilled.  Our first rough concept was heavily inspired by our love for Rolly's "Museum of the Weird":

Our first concept.  Too weird?

Rolly's bizarre bats and dragons proved to be a little too dark for the tastes of the magazine's art director, who asked us to try something lighter and more cheerful. We decided to take elements from some of Rolly's more familiar Disneyland designs and build an imaginary theme park out of them.  We lovingly referred to this concept as "Crump City":

"Crump City" preliminary sketch

 The art director liked it, and decided we should do sort of a mock "attraction poster" with the elements.  The design became more and more simple as our "poster" took shape.  We created our art digitally in Adobe Illustrator and played around with possible color schemes.

Experimenting with different colors and values.

We did a lot of fussing with colors until we landed on the final bright purple version at the top of this post.  Everyone seemed to like it, and we even received a swell compliment from Rolly himself.  Score!