The painstaking process behind making the ‘Jurassic Park’ logo
There’s something extraordinary about the Jurassic Park movie franchise, which has remained one of the most famous film series for three decades now. Steven Spielberg’s awe-inspiring vision of bringing dinosaurs back to life will forever be one of the most memorable cinematic experiences the world will ever know.
The original 1993 film, starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough, was based on Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel of the same name and told of a wealthy business magnate who hires a group of genetic scientists to create a wildlife park of de-extinct dinosaurs, but when the power to the park’s defences shut down, all hell breaks loose, and a struggle to survive begins.
While there is no doubt as to the iconic status of the Jurassic Park franchise and its inventive use of animatronics, equally memorable is the film’s logo, which will forever be burned into our retina from the many VHS copies that littered our shelves through the 1990s and into the 21st century.
The person responsible for that is Tom Martin, the legendary art director who made thousands of movie posters, logos and graphics for several productions, including Schindler’s List, Twins, Do The Right Thing, Back to the Future and, of course, Jurassic Park, proving his excellent contributions.
Spielberg tasked Martin with the unenviable challenge of creating a logo that could simultaneously brand the film and the fictional theme park. Discussing the task, Martin once noted, “We visited the set during the production and saw some of the dinosaurs and props. They were actually going to have branded products, merchandise in the store in the film.”
“They needed a logo to put on the items in the gift shop,” he added. The artist then worked with a number of agencies in trying to create the logo, but of the hundreds that he submitted, none were of interest or liked by the studio, nor by Spielberg.
Eventually, the studio and Martin decided to use the dinosaur logo that had been on the front of Michael Crichton’s novel, which was drawn by a book cover artist called Chip Kidd. Martin and his team used the graphic and put it inside a circle with a new typeface called Newland.
The logo was getting there, but it needed just a bit of polish, and the final touch was adding a last flourish at the bottom of the logo to really bring it to life. “We added this little jungle scene at the bottom in order to give it scale because, without that, the dinosaur could be any size — it could be a baby,” Martin said. “With the jungle below, it made the dinosaur look huge. That’s my contribution to making that logo work.”
Jurassic Park might not have been half as memorable if it weren’t for its iconic logo. Tom Martin went through a rigorous process to make sure the final product was right, knowing that the image would be seen in the film, on its promotional material and in gift shops across the world, and it’s fair to say he absolutely nailed the brief.
