EPCOT Made Simple

EPCOT Center’s first 15 years were marked by a design aesthetic I always found both ennobling and surprisingly playful. Yes, I know some of you don’t agree, but even if you found the design more in keeping with Mussolini’s style of over-the-top grandiosity (albeit in a distinctly modernist mode), there was one aspect of EPCOT that no one I know could criticize:

The logos.

Oh, yes … the logos!

Now this was a brilliant concept: Reduce the grand scope and ambition of expansive attractions down to their absolute core essence, and then go one step further – create an overall design program that brings these disparate elements together.

There was the "radioactive" Universe of Energy; the virtually literal Living Seas; the straightforward (and oddly exciting) Horizons; the iconic Spaceship Earth ... and more, of course, including the main EPCOT Center logo that literally tied five of the circles (representing the original five attractions) together with a globe that represented both Spaceship Earth and World Showcase.

You could take the logos simply at face value -- as representing individual attractions -- or find even greater meaning in their careful design.

What Disney’s Imagineers created in EPCOT’s original graphics program was slickly beautiful and astonishingly ahead of its time. (No doubt AT&T's graphic artists at least thought about the original Spaceship Earth logo when designing that company's "spinning globe" symbol.)

Any great logo or symbol seeks to make a simple, easily understood graphic representation out of a difficult, abstract concept. It’s tough enough to do that for a single concept (like a corporation) … but to do it eight times for a single park, to create a strong, unified vision that not only identified individual components but also served as a way to tie them together … that was brilliance, pure and simple.

Compare the sleek, instantly indentifiable logos of EPCOT Center – created 25 years ago – at the top of this post to the busy, hard-to-read logo for the new Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor attraction at the Magic Kingdom. Now, bear in mind that in these deceptively simple circular logos, Imagineers weren’t just communicating the concept of a single ride or show, but of an entire, multi-faceted pavilion.

The logos could be understood and appreciated whether or not you spoke English, whether or not you were even old enough to read – they immediately told you where you were and, when used on park signage, where you wanted to go.

They made EPCOT Center simple, but they didn’t dumb it down. Many guests, myself chief among them, could envision a day when logos like this would define our lives, when we would spend our day orienting ourselves not through words and images, but graphically. The logos were in some ways the very definition of a “world showcase,” one we could all understand at a glance and easily navigate, even if we had different ways to communicate or interpret the experience inside.

The EPCOT logos were, in many ways, the apotheosis of the promise of EPCOT itself: A complex and exciting, vibrant, ever-changing world rendered simple and clear on the surface, at once homogeneous and plain, yet rich and varied. I loved those logos.

I guess it’s not a surprise, then, that they were among the first things to go when Epcot got “Disney-ized.” They truly set the place apart.

Like EPCOT itself, they exist now mostly in memory – perhaps waiting, like EPCOT, for the day when someone can appreciate their meaning and reconcile the Disney that created them with the Disney that destroyed them.