Introduction
I have worked for/with The Walt Disney Company for a large percentage over the course of my career.
I have also been a fan of the company and its vast entertainment empire; specifically the theme park business. I set out to write a travel guide that approached the Magic Kingdom Theme Park from a different angle than the multitude of books that flood the travel section of BARNES & NOBLE or Amazon.
The Magic Kingdom Theme Park located at The Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, FL was Walt Disney’s second major urban planning initiative. The scope of the destination was much larger than what was realized initially, but due to Walt’s untimely death in December of 1966, plans for that experimental community were shelved.
However, Roy Disney had another idea and that was to replicate the Magic Kingdom of Disneyland but on a much larger scale in their recently purchased land in the heart of Central Florida. The park would be bigger and include enough land for the park to whisk its guests away to a fantasy away from the world and without the encroachment to which the park in Anaheim had become subjected.
Background
Problem
How to take a destination as large as The Walt Disney World Resort’s 43 square miles, with 4 theme parks, 2 water parks, multiple golf course, with shopping and dining across the property and create an easy-to-use travel guide? Leverage all of the qualities of the iPad to deliver a immersive book for Apple’s iBooks.
Solution
I have actually had this idea percolating in various degrees of completion for about twenty years; dating back to the era when CD-ROMs were going to rule the entertainment world. With the ability to showcase rich imagery, videos and immersive VR views of select locations within the park, I knew this was the platform as the best way to showcase the Elements of Magic: The Interactive Guidebook for Disney’s Magic Kingdom.
Solution
My approach to breaking down The Walt Disney World Resort into an approachable and consumable travel guide was two-parts: 1.) Step away from traditional publishing and use the robust and immersive features of Apple’s iBooks, 2.) Dedicate the first book to a single park, and 3.)Develop a visual language that presents a feature-rich resort destination that makes planning a vacation easy.
Through the use of extensive original photography, interactive timeline, immersive rich-media, and 360-degree virtual reality (VR) views I authored and independently published an interactive guidebook for Disney’s Magic Kingdom
Process
As I started out on my outline for this book, I wanted to develop a theme that was different than most other travel guides on the market. I wanted to develop a hook that helped identify the attractions within the park with ease for the reader as well as provide opportunities to market supplemental products that built off of this theme.
Upon my initial audit of the parks, using their way-finding guides from their park maps, I broke the park into its specific active lands: Main Street U.S.A., Adventureland, Frontierland, Liberty Square, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. Now the approach using active lands allowed the options to include retired lands as a means of sharing trivia and historic details about the park. This use of retired aspects of the park was also used in the approach to attractions, dining, and shopping elements across the park as well.
Dividing the park into its respective lands then led to breaking those land into attractions, queued themed experiences, and dining that is available to the park’s guests.
Once I had a spreadsheet of these items I began to further categorize them to include the park ID, latitude, longitude, etc. As I was reviewing the spreadsheet it sparked the idea to use the periodic table as a guide to display the items within the park. I chose the key elements that I thought were of interest to Disney fans and settled on these key items:
Due to the fact that there are so many shopping options throughout the park, and some of those are pop-ups based on time of year, in-park celebration, etc. the final decision was made to only highlight attractions and fixed dining locations as tiles; this corresponds to the way the park maps highlight items as well so there was a level of context for the Disney traveler to maintain this presentation within my guide book.
To further delineate the attractions from dining tiles in an effort to make them abundantly clear to the viewer, the styling of the tiles also differed a bit. The attractions tile has a colored background that corresponds to its appropriate land, while the dining tile uses that color as the border to its tile.
Another benefit of the use of the tiles is in the ability to market items using this unique visual library on posters/prints, mugs, t-shirts, etc. This library is also being extended to books highlighting the other parks of The Walt Disney World Resort as well as their parks around the world.
Using a simple graphic system to display a specified set of data points allows a comprehensive presentation of data in a consumable and navigable manner. The use of the periodic table chart as a means to navigate a robust destination replete with scores of attractions and dining locations reduces the cognitive load to the reader, while providing a simple, obvious, and repeatable library of tiles to draw a reader further into The Elements of Magic, The Interactive Guidebook for Disney’s Magic Kingdom.
Imagery
