Iconography
The iconography is essential to the Play it Safe campaign. The icons represent each health and safety topic that needs to be addressed on the mountain. They fall into three buckets: skill, experience, and hazard. They also represent guest behaviors based on their skill level. For example, beginners likely won't be ducking ropes or attempting to ride closed terrain.
Guest Type Skill Level
Anyone who has been to a ski resort is familiar with the green circle, blue square, and black diamond shapes to represent skill level. For the Play it Safe campaign refresh, we decided to bring these well known symbols to life, showing how a person is expected to ski at any given skill level.
Snow Sliding Devices
The devices that are allowed, restricted, or prohibited at Vail Resorts.
Chairlift Ads
On Mountain Signage
It would be an understatement to say that Vail Resorts uses a lot of on-mountain signage. Spanning nearly 20 different ski resorts across the US and Japan, there is a lot of messaging that is required around the various parts of the resort. From tree wells to rest areas, we created authoritative yet friendly messaging so that skiers and riders are engaged by the signs. We even managed to work in a Lord of the Rings reference. :-)
Lift Tower Signs
Trail Signs
V-Shape Baffle Signs
Mesh Baffle Signs
Suggested Route Maps
Possibly the most forward thinking part of the campaign, we created a new pocket map to help develop guest skier and rider progressions with terrain choices that parallel their skill level. Some of the resorts are so large that it can be overwhelming to plan out your day, especially if you're new to skiing or snowboarding in general.
Website
Safety is a big deal at Vail Resorts to the point that we wanted the guest to be able to access lots of safety information before they ever set foot on resort grounds. The web team at Vail was a dream to work with, already having loads of templated content blocks to work from in order to set up a prototype site with tons of new content.
