Sunday, June 3, 2012

Retro '71


Welcome back to Designerland and another fun-filled Retro '71 shirt concept. This week’s post is a special three-for-one that I hope you'll all enjoy.

When WED Enterprises started dreaming and scheming up the Walt Disney World Resort, Imagineers had dreamed of 5 home-away-from-home domiciles that surrounded the Kingdom: The Contemporary Resort, The Polynesian Village, The Asian Resort, The Venetian Resort and lastly, The Persian Resort. Sadly, the latter three never saw it past the model phase within the halls of 1401 Flower Street. Various sites have already documented the history of the "Resorts that Never Were" and if you'd like to find out more about these resorts, I suggest you take a look here, here and here.


Much like I did with the shirt series for the faux real estate companies that purchased the land for the Walt Disney World Resort, I decided I would try coming up with logos for these “lost” resorts. I'm sure somewhere in the halls of WDI, in some flat file, there may be some concept renderings of logos for the resorts. Seeing how I don't have access to that type of stuff I just decided to use my imagination...after all, imagination is the heart of all creation, right? I tried focusing on simple iconography mixed with display fonts that I felt carried the story of each resort. The real trick was trying to get them to stylistically flow with the Contemporary and Polynesian Village's original logos.



The shirt colors and ink colors are derived from color combinations that are true to the countries these resorts were themed around. An homage to ideas that never made it, but should have....


Well that does it for this week’s special post. Tune in next week for the final Main Street Type Case Study I've been promising you. Have a great week and see you all soon.