Ted Arison, a borrowed liner and a new name.

Carnival Cruise Line began in 1972, when Ted Arison started sailing cruises out of Miami. English Wikipedia says Arison turned for finance to his friend Meshulam Riklis, whose Boston company American International Travel Service set the venture up as a subsidiary and was to market it. In 1974, according to the same account, Riklis sold that interest to Arison, who took the company on alone, together with its debts.

The line did not start with a new ship. Its opening vessel was the Mardi Gras, a former transatlantic liner bought from Canadian Pacific, and English Wikipedia, citing the design historian Bruce Peter’s 2017 book Cruise Ships: A Design Voyage, says Carnival adapted the green Canadian Pacific livery for its own logo, changing the colours to red, white and blue. More second-hand liners followed: the Carnivale, another former Canadian Pacific ship, in 1975, and the Festivale, once the Transvaal Castle, a few years later.

Those conversions are where the brand’s visual language took shape. In a 2019 interview with Cruise & Ferry Interiors, the Miami architect Joe Farcus said his work for Carnival began in 1975, when his employer, the architect Morris Lapidus, made him project manager on the refurbishment of the line’s second vessel, then called the Queen Anna Maria. Ted Arison then asked him to convert the Transvaal Castle into the Festivale, which, Farcus said, allowed him to open his own studio; he went on to work with Arison and later with his son, Micky Arison.

Farcus described Ted Arison’s aim in the 1970s as making cruising a year-round holiday for everyone, rather than a product for older travellers with time and money. The design of the ships became the way the company expressed that idea.

Fun Ships and a funnel with wings.

The line’s ships became known as the “Fun Ships.” In July 1997 the business magazine Florida Trend profiled Farcus as Carnival’s interior architect, the man who designed “just about everything” on its ships except the hull and engines, and quoted the Coral Gables designer Howard Snoweiss saying that Farcus’s work reinforced the “Fun Ships” idea in the market. Farcus called his approach “entertainment architecture,” the magazine reported, and described trying to capitalise on “a sense of romance and adventure about the sea.”

The same article described interiors built from marquee lights set into floors, metallic greys, gold panelling and bright red indicator lights, and noted that the ships of the Fantasy class carried “the distinctive red, winged funnel, known as the ‘Farcus Funnel.’” That funnel is the centre of the brand. English Wikipedia describes the company’s logo as a funnel shaped like a whale’s tail, in red, white and blue, and notes that the same design is built onto the ships themselves; it dates the winged funnel to the Tropicale, the ship built for the line and delivered in 1982, and credits its design to Farcus, citing his own book Design on the High Seas and Philip Dawson’s 2000 study of cruise-ship design.

English Wikipedia adds that the winged funnel has since been used on every ship built for the line, while ships transferred from sister lines have sometimes kept their own funnels, as described below.

Advertising carried the same tone. English Wikipedia says that in 1984 Carnival began a television campaign starring the presenter Kathie Lee Gifford, who remained associated with the line for decades afterwards; the company marked that relationship in 2019, when Gifford left NBC’s Today show.

Design and documentation.

A cruise brand is read first at a distance. The funnel is the tallest flat surface on a ship and usually carries the line’s mark or colours, so it has to work as a silhouette against sky and sea, legible from a pier, a tender or a port-city skyline. The hull livery does similar work at water level: a band of colour, a painted name and a port of registry at the stern, and often a logo near the bow, all applied at a scale where fine detail disappears and simple shapes carry the message.

Ashore, the identity moves into terminal signage: check-in hall banners, gangway graphics, luggage tags and directional boards that guide people who may not share a language. Onboard, wayfinding has to cope with long corridors, many decks and port and starboard sides; deck numbers, stair-tower colours and pictograms tend to matter more than any wordmark. Printed collateral such as brochures, daily programmes, menus and keycards then carries the typeface and palette into the hand. For a designer, the useful lesson is how one mark has to stretch from a steel funnel down to a cabin door sign.

A navy hull for a new decade.

Carnival Cruise Line is no longer a stand-alone company. It is a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation & plc and has its headquarters in Doral, Florida, according to English Wikipedia. The group took its present shape in 2002, when the British company P&O Princess accepted an all-share takeover from Carnival, The Guardian reported in October that year, having earlier agreed a deal with Royal Caribbean; the combined business kept listings in both London and New York. That brought Princess Cruises into the same group as Carnival.

The line’s look has kept changing within the group. In May 2021 Carnival announced that the hull design of its new Mardi Gras, a ship that took the name of its original 1972 vessel, would be rolled out across the fleet before the line’s 50th birthday in 2022, Cruise Industry News reported. The livery pairs a navy-blue hull, which the company said was inspired by officers’ uniforms, with red and white accents running the length of the ship; after the Mardi Gras, the Carnival Magic was the next ship to be repainted, during a drydock in Marseilles. The red, white and blue funnel stayed.

The brand has also absorbed ships from sister lines. English Wikipedia says that in 2022 Carnival announced “Fun Italian Style,” bringing the Costa Venezia and Costa Firenze from Costa Cruises to sail under the Carnival name while keeping their Italian interiors and Costa funnels, and that in 2024 the group announced that P&O Cruises Australia would be merged into Carnival, with two of its ships renamed for the line.

For a design guide, Carnival Cruise Line shows how a single piece of ship architecture can become a logo and then hold a brand together through new owners, new hulls and borrowed ships. Compare Princess Cruises, its sister line in the same group, and Disney, another leisure brand built on a character-like mark. For this guide we use funnel red, hull navy and deck white with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Carnival Cruise Line’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.