Week 8- Site Specific Blog- Citlalli

 

For this week's blog post I visited Downtown Disney. I think the walk designers were trying to create a relaxing environment. There are a lot of fountains throughout the walk and the sound of running water tends to soothe people. The fountains themselves had really cool designs and there was light aimed at wherever there was water running. I do want to mention that I think the walk was mainly designed to look attractive and inviting from the parks into the walk, rather than coming in from the Disney Walk parking. The lighting of the trees with fairy lights, as shown above, really makes me feel as if we're going into a fairy world. I like the lighting on the trees because it broadens up the environment. I feel that if they weren't lit there would be a lot more emptiness and the magical feel of the walk wouldn't really be there.

One of my favorite stores has to be the Icecream shop. At first, I was drawn to it because of the smell, it smelled so delicious and heavenly. Once I turned to see where the smell was coming from I saw this store. I do have to mention that at first glance this doesn't really look like an ice cream shop, but paying closer attention to detail, I thought it was a pretty cool design. I think the use of patterns for wallpaper really draws me in. I also like the fact that the door handles are ice cream cones. My favorite part of the design, however, was the ice cream cone-shaped lights hanging above the customer line. They gave off a pretty cool white which was then balanced out by warm whites from the other lights in the store. This combination of light, shapes, and smells really made the environment really inviting.

The World of Disney store was very bright, visible, and beautiful with the Christmas lights and decorations hung around. However, I think what killed it for me was the use of green lights on the ceiling. I understand that the designers were using green and red for Christmas, however, when first walking in all you can see is the green, so it looks out of place and not really Christmasy. I think the use of blues might have been a better option for the sealing. Because although blue is just more to signify winter, I feel it would have balanced out well with the many Christmas decorations this store already has.