Mickey's Ten Commandments

Disney Imagineering's rules for creating magic.

1. Know your audience. This is fundamental.
2. Wear your guests' shoes. Walt used to tell the designers to go down to Disneyland at least every other week, watch what people do, get in line just like they do.
3. Organize the flow of people. This is one thing the old parks did not do. At Disney, everyone is funnelled down Main street, Everyone has the same experience.
4. Create a Wenie, a visual magnet. The castle at the end of main street, the rocket at tomorrowland, these say, "come this way."
5. Communicate with visual literacy.
6. Avoid overload, create turnons. Don't lose people by throwing too much information at them.
7. Tell one story at a time. You can loose people pretty quickly if you let them out of your story. At our parks, we tell a single story in sequence.
8. Avoid contradiction, maintain identity.
9. An ounce of treatment, a ton of treat.
10. Maintain it. If a building has peeling paint, it looks like it's out of business.