The Typography of Disney's Animal Kingdom Part 1: Africa
Dr. Benjamin George and I have turned in our draft manuscript for Disney and the Theming of the Contemporary Zoo: Kingdoms of Artifice to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield, now part of Bloomsbury, for their new Studies in Disney and Culture line.
Kingdoms of Artifice is a product of personal interviews with over three dozen zoo designers and professionals, landscape architects, and former Disney Imagineers. In addition to visiting Disney’s Animal Kingdom and ten other Disney theme parks, we also traveled to nearly 50 zoos worldwide to conduct first-hand site analysis.
To celebrate, I thought I’d take a close look at the typography of Disney’s Animal Kingdom (1998) which is at the heart of our narrative. Zoos, like museums and other cultural institutions, contain many text displays. As a result, Animal Kingdom feature more typography than other Disney theme park I have visited—over 3,200 individual pieces of signage and ephemera.
Harambe—Swahili for Working Together or Coming Together—is a fictional place largely inspired by the island town of Lamu off the coast of Kenya, but the designers deliberately avoided copying any one street or marketplace, insteading creating a pastiched montage of the many places they visited, drew, and photographed during their East African research.
Harambe is teeming with exemplary graphic design from Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI). The Imagineering in a Box videos on WDI’s YouTube channel provide information about many Disney design techniques, and were produced to prepare students for the company’s design competitions and internship programs. Joe Rohde, who was creative lead on the Animal Kingdom project, is interviewed in several clips, often showing examples from that park.
Lesson 1.7 in the series is the only source we have found in which Disney park graphics are parsed by specific function. Rohde likens these categories, or levels of graphic design, to three flavors:
The first is the base level, ghost graphics. These function as visual props, part of the set design of a themed space. One example would be leftover signage from prior proprietors, adding a feeling of age, or signs that are still in use but clearly from an earlier era.
Or old advertisements and broadsides that don’t convey anything except a sense of place. Rohde reminds that ghost graphics operate on a subliminal level. Guests “don’t need to read them, they don’t need to be legible, [guests] don’t actually need to ever look at them.” They are there to be seen and felt as backdrop.
Second is a level that is “inside the story” and helps guests to “understand the story.” Story graphics could be the names of actual shops and restaurants on signs, plus all ephemera related to the backstory of those spaces told through posters or letters, and also branding and labeling on fictional products like a barrel of gunpowder or a bag of coffee.
Rohde says guests are “supposed to read them,” but they are not essential. Story graphics are still “show elements,” but can add richness to the guest experience, unlike ghost graphics, which can be safely ignored. When such themed story graphics contain educational content at a zoo, we refer to them as embedded didactics.
Lastly are those signs and notices which are operational graphics. They provide legal and safety information, important warnings, or information needed to complete a task, like a wait time or a menu board. This category also includes any wayfinding, like exit signs or public restroom icons, and directions from one area to another.
These graphics are often themed to their environments like the other two, but at this level—the most relevant, essential, in fact—their legibility is paramount above any stylistic flourish. Rohde emphasizes that “the range of design control over them is more limited.” These graphics are “a category of communication I am supposed to read, I have to read,” and thus their expressiveness is “usually more restrained.”
Rohde instructs that for a themed space to be successful, guests must never “become aware of the artificial difference” between the levels. All three types of graphic design need to work together in balance and harmony with one another to present a seamless visual experience.
This means every aspect, from language(s), typeface choices, shape language, mark making, illustration style, and color palette through to substrate and application.
What makes Disney graphic design distinctive is—being a theatrical company, as Rohde likes to say—the Imagineers play with all the levels, whereas traditional architects are largely only concerned with the third type, if they have any role to play in a project’s signage at all. As with most forms of design, graphics and signs are really only noticed when executed poorly. With Joe Rohde’s creative direction, at Animal Kingdom the overall graphic design is exceptional, perhaps the very best to be found at Walt Disney World.
Ghost Graphics
Harambe is covered with ghost graphics. Some are advertisements for local businesses, others are announcements for upcoming events. These have been applied to walls with a kind of faux wheat pasting and then sealed under clear coat, all of their rips, tears, and wrinkles preserved.
The layering and distressing is all part of the effect. Even though many of the posters are torn and illegible, they contribute, as do other props, to what Imagineering Legend John Hench calls eyewash—small details that add to overall gestalt of a themed space.
Many of these graphics employ a particular vernacular, that of amateurish or DIY designs. The typographic choices are often intentionally poor, and the illustrations and photography badly executed on purpose. I’ve created pieces like this before, and it’s kind of fun to “do it all wrong.” This extends to the copywriting: Camping doesn’t mean “cheap” - it means “value.”
In typical Disney fashion, there are moments of humor and irony. A notice boldly says posting advertisements is prohibited, and just below it are various ads.
Some ghost graphics also carry subtle story moments. The original plot for the Kilimanjaro Safaris attraction concerned illegal poaching. In 1998, the driver would have began the tour by telling us that the Harambe Wildlife Reserve was established in 1971, but “unfortunately the poachers still go after our elephants.”
Guests would learn on their journey that a mother elephant had been captured along with its baby, and were tasked with helping in a rescue. For various reasons, this storyline was toned down and eventually removed completely from the safari. But the broadside notices warning of poachers are still plastered about the walls of Harambe.
Story Graphics
The most common kind of story graphics within the Disney parks are the names of fictional businesses that serve as fronts for the various food, beverage, and souvenir stands. In Harambe, they feature playful typography and appear to be hand-painted by locals. There are often real world “mistakes” that give these signs more personality. At the Tamu Tamu refreshment stand, Ice Cream and Hot Drinks apparently used to be sold, but no longer.
Story graphics are also seen on attractions, and are designed to blend in with the environment and appear real-world. Here on the Kilimanjaro Safaris guests are supposed to be riding through the fictional Harambe Wildlife Reserve. The sign is routed in wood with an appropriate typeface and suitably aged, as if it has been sitting in the sun for decades.
This includes the branding of attraction vehicles. Although regrettably employing a hand-painted variant of the very overused Copperplate Gothic, the Eastern Star line is loosely based on the actual Eastern African Railway system which crosses Kenya and Tanzania. The cities listed on the locomotive are all true to the region—Lusaka (capital of Zambia), Nairobi (capital of Kenya), and Kisangani (eastern city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Copperplate Gothic is also used at the main entrance to Animal Kingdom, so there is a logical connection here.
Some story graphics could almost be placed at the ghost level. Yet this hand-painted notice provides a key story detail—when Harambe was actually being finished up by the Imagineers in the fall of 1997.
Themed applications also extend to the Disney parks’ usual sponsors, in this case Quilted Northern Tissue paper. As the typography here is based on offerings from Letterhead Fonts, also increasingly featured at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure in recent years, it appears this graphic was added well after Animal Kingdom’s opening year.
Operational Graphics
Wayfinding is perhaps the most common form of operational graphic. Where do I want to go, and how do I get there? These signs must be extremely legible, yet still reside in-story in terms of the typeface choices, substrates, and applications. These metal fins look plain enough, but looking closely you can see rust stains and typesetting that is intentionally a tad on the sloppy side.
The faces here are a mix of bold gothic sans serif and Carol Twombly’s Lithos (1989), based on Ancient Greek lettering. If there are two cliches which recur at zoos everywhere, they are Neuland (1923), a German wood typeface designed by Rudolf Koch, and Lithos. Neuland has been used for exotic, particularly African, vibes since the 1940s. Its inline variant was made famous by the 1993 film Jurassic Park, and ever since Neuland has been used liberally by zoos to mean Jungle, Africa, and Exotic.
Lithos has no such lineage, but to the untrained eye it looks similar enough to substitute for the older German lettering. You are sure to recognize them both at your next zoo visit.
Operational graphics are also incorporated into attraction signage. Though it could be considered a story graphic, this sign also says where the train is going to. It also breaks the story world by explicitly mentioning Disney’s Animal Kingdom, taking guests—for practical purposes—out of Harambe in East Africa and reminding them they are in a theme park.
Graphics design plays an essential role in immersing guests in Harambe. Hand-painted typography is everywhere in Kenyan English. Careful attention has also been paid to add lettering rendered in Swahili—also called Kiswahili—the Bantu language widely spoken in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Mozambique, parts of Somalia, and Tanzania.
Swahili was chosen by the design team specifically because it crosses all these geographic boundaries. Notice that the British convention Way Out is used rather than exit, staying true to Kenya’s colonial past.
All the graphics in Harambe include the work of Imagineering writer Kevin Brown. On his travels through Africa, Brown collected every matter of print ephemera he could find—newspapers, pamphlets, posters, signs, and stickers—to learn the subtleties of Kenyan English with its “tweaked, third-world Victorian” grammar and worked closely with a Los Angeles university translator, Sara Mirza, to craft the appropriate Swahili / English pairings.
British spelling is used on all English applications, as in Behaviour here. This story graphic is blended with an operational notice. The Harambe Conservation Code is fictional, yet it is true that on the safari attraction the animals do indeed have the right of way, which sometimes causes delays on the journey.
Similarly, this genuine list of rules is presented completely in-story. This is one of the nicest examples of hand-painted lettering which is imperfectly organic yet perfectly legible.
Sometimes a sign simply needs a title and a big red arrow. Again, the lettering is imperfect yet bold and clear. This could have been set in a typeface digitally, but the effect would not be the same. This is what sets Disney apart from so many other theme parks.
Only at Animal Kingdom could you find a sign in Africa showing you the way to Asia. And that is where I will be heading next.
Continued in Part 2.