The Park District of Forest Park has a new logo and a tagline that will be gradually phased in over the months and years to come.

This was something Adam Cumbee, the park district’s marketing manager, has been working on since late last year. With renovations of the pocket parks and the new indoor facility on the south side of Harrison Street on the horizon, the staff felt that it was a good opportunity to refresh the brand and create a unified identity for all park district facilities. 

The end results were a mix of old and new, reworking the leaf logo used on the park district website and utilizing green and dark blue colors the park district has already been using, while also adding orange to the color scheme and evoking the place marker used on online maps. Cumbee told the Review that the new tagline — “stay close, go far” — is meant to show that Forest Parkers could take advantage of the wide variety of amenities and activities the park district offers without having to leave the village.  

The park district board of commissioners unanimously approved the new logo during its April 20 meeting. Park District Executive Director Jackie Iovinelli told the Review the new logo and tag line will be rolled out gradually as the park district buys new staff uniforms and renovations begin.

The park district has been using a teal green leaf logo on its website, marketing materials, internal documents and some signage. The Aquatic Center, 7501 Harrison St., has a black and white triangle logo, and Roos Recreation Center, 7329 Harrison St., uses dark blue/purple and lime green colors in its own circle R logo. The village-owned pocket parks, which the park district has been operating since 2020, either still retain village signage or have no signage at all. 

During the Jan. 19 park board meeting, Cumbee said that this variety of logos meant that people often don’t know that the Aquatic Center is even one of their facilities. Another factor the staff was considering was that they will be renovating Reiger Park, 1526 Circle Ave., and Popelka Park, with the renovations of Remembrance Park, 7341 Randolph St., expected further down the pipeline. With new signs coming in, they wanted to know what to put on them. 

Cumbee told the Review he came up with several logo designs and ran them past the staff. The final designs were also displayed at park district buildings, and he settled on the one visitors gravitated toward.

Cumbee said that, with both the logo and the tagline, he wanted to get across that Forest Parkers and out of towners could take advantage of the facilities and the wide variety of classes without “having to go far.” The new logo evoked the waypoint shape used on Google Maps and other mapping tools “to kind of fit with the tagline of being able to find it here.”  Inside, two leaves wrapped in a yin-yang-like pattern. which, Cumbee said, didn’t have any deeper meaning – he just thought it looked good aesthetically.

The color scheme, on the other hand, was deliberate.

“One of the big goals of the rebrand was to kind of bring the park district branding and Roos branding a little closer together, so the gradient in the leaves, and the primary colors of the new design, are the teal from our original park logo, and the dark blue/purple color from the Roos logo,” he said.

During the April 20 meeting, Cumbee shared what potential new Popelka Park, Reiger Park and Remembrance Park signs would look like. While the basic design is the same – the park name on the dark teal half-trapezoid over a rectangle with the logo and tagline, there are some variations. Reiger Park’s background features a rock-like texture, while Remembrance Park sign evokes the United States flag. 

The board approved the new logo without much comment beyond praising Cumbee for doing a “good job.” Iovinelli said she was impressed that they were able to create a logo and tagline of this quality entirely in-house, without hiring an outside consultant.

Cumbee reflected that “it feels cool” to know that the logo and tagline he designed will soon start to make its way across the park district, adding that the fact that the staff and the residents had a chance to weigh in on the design was important to him.

“Everybody had a hand in making it,” he said. “That’s a point of pride for me – everybody had a hand in the [logo and tagline’s] creation.”