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This is it! We’ve made it to #10 on my 10 Best Books for theme park professionals… Are you ready for Action Park???!! In his book Andy Mulvihill, the son of Action Park’s founder, recounts the “Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park.” Action Park is now the […]

Book 9 — Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik I’m writing this from on-site today, where our team is delivering handmade kinetic figures for a parade at a new theme park that’s opening soon. Being here, I am highly aware of the difference between the worlds we create on film, or in a computer, and the […]

#8: Places vs. Designs — In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs studied the best loved neighborhoods of cities like New York, Boston and Toronto and documented the positive characteristics they shared in common. Things like human-scaled streets and sidewalks, mixed-use blocks with coffee shops active in the morning and bars […]

The NASA Graphics Standards Manual is #7 on my 10 Best Books for Themed Entertainment professionals. Why? Because this book offered a road map from governmental and corporate wastelands of graphic design to the promised land of a future world of colors, lettering, and order. In 1972 the National Endowment for the Arts, launched the […]

Book #6 – The Creative Act. I pre-ordered Rick Rubin’s book and when it arrived I was confused, and maybe a little disappointed. Reading the first few pages of The Creative Act, it sounded like a lot of new age bullshit from a multi-gillionaire mega producer. But I decided to keep reading. I started underlining […]

Moving from the real world of the Chicago World’s Fair to the fantasy realms of The Night Circus a question arises: why do we call it the Blue Sky phase? Book number 5 in my 10 Best Books for Themed Entertainment industry insiders is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. It’s the only novel on […]

Book 4 — The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, probably the most likely book to be on this list for Themed Entertainment professionals because it has everything: a world’s fair, live events, master planning, landscape design, the origin story of the Ferris Wheel, theme park food, mass transportation, all the stuff we […]

Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat… I love color and I’m kind of a color nerd. I like finding great colors in nature, but I also love color crammed into paint tubes, pencils, watercolor pans, crayons and cans of Krylon. I love pulling off those tiny paper Pantone chips. And […]

The second entry in my 10 Best Books for Themed Entertainment is Fireworks: A History and Celebration, by George Plimpton. Gen X’ers like me may remember George Plimpton, king of the Mid-Atlantic accent, from the Intellivision game console commercials in the 1980s. But he is best known for his contribution to the literary journal The […]

I’m going to post my top 10 book recommendations for themed entertainment insiders and anyone interested in the inspiration that informs the design and production process. First up — in no particular order — The Bridge, by Gay Talese. The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge by Gay Talese What does the construction of […]