Theme Park Design

From 1989 to 1995, I worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering (the Theme Park design arm of the Walt Disney Co.). In that time I had the opportunity of working as the lead designer on Splash Mountain for Walt Disney World, and as one of the lead designers for Mickey's Toontown in Disneyland CA. Projects of this size involve hundreds of conceptual drawings, and in my years at Imagineering I created countless conceptual drawings and paintings. You can see some of them in recently published books about the Disney parks (see list below). Today I continue to work with Imagineering on a freelance basis.

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For Mickey's Toontown, I worked as the lead Show Designer in charge of the Downtown portion of the project.

This initial sketch of Mickey's house
was one of the very first for the Toontown
project. Although the design went through
many variations, the final version has a lot
in common with this first sketch.

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To see more photos of some of my finished Theme Park work,
click HERE!

Splash Mountain was my first projects for Imagineering.
At the time, Disneyland's Splash had opened and Tokyo's
Splash was under way.

My personal goal was to make a visual distinction between the attraction's cartoon world interior and the "real" world of its exterior .We also took great pains to make the story as easy to follow as possible.

The design for the Florida Splash Mountain included an all new elevated train station for Frontierland. We had a unique problem.The finished design would have to live within the themes of both the Big Thunder and Splash Mountain attractions, which would eventually sit side by side.

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Where to Find More Images of my Imagineering Work:

The Disney Gallery at Disneyland recently carried stationary cards with
my drawings of both Mickey's House, the Toontown Cab Company, and the Haunted Mansion..

"Walt Disney Imagineering, A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real"
by Hyperion Books has two pieces of my work (pg.43 & 187)

"Designing Disney's Theme Parks- The Architecture of Reassurance"
by Karal Ann Marling (pg.134)

"The Art of Disneyland"
by Jeff Kurtti & Bruce Gordon (pg. 96,97,99 & 100)