LP Lotion: Joe Rohde on Animal Kingdom's Birthday
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By diagraming out the journey the design team was able to keep the story anchored.
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Joe gave the example of designing Africa. There are variety of ways to represent Africa but in keeping their themes in mind they were able to determine which vision of Africa would support the park's story. In this case they selected the Swahili architecture of the east coast of Africa that inspires Harambe. It is a true reflection of architecture but they selected it because the cubeness and the harshness of angles within the architecture here provides a sharp contrast to the natural beauty that is discovered on the safari. So despite the fact that the safari is a well designed machine for keeping animals alive and bringing thousands of guests through each day, it feels natural.

To showcase that the process isn't quite as neat and tidy as it might appear through the images above Joe Rohde showed various concept sketches for the entrance to Animal Kingdom. Among them was a large ark.
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Garden entrance with guests in a procession of animals. However, imagine the photo album of families smiling at the entrance surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of sculpted animal behinds.
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Another concept was cottage style with stained glass - very "Woodstock" but it was decided that it had a narrow audience and it's not about animals.
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