The Dr. Seuss Experience

The Dr. Seuss estate is one of the best-selling children's brands worldwide. The Dr. Seuss books were groundbreaking in improving children’s literacy across the US and with hundreds of millions of copies sold over more than 70 years and many feature films. Dr. Seuss' books and ideas speak so powerfully to every generation from toddlers to great-grandparents and so our job was to create an experience that could engage a wide generational demographic and which did justice to such an incredible body of work and the many millions of fans all over the world.

Creative Director Max Painter and Lead Designer Daria Maksimova worked with Kilburn Live (producers) and Dr Seuss Enterprises to develop an immersive adaptation of the Seuss Books. We wanted to create bold, immersive environments that had rich colours and which felt tactile throughout, avoiding the moulded ‘fibreglass’ look and feel that is so often used in brand activations. Thus our Truffula Trees and Horton’s Clovers had to have stunningly tactile tufts and each environment had a very clear and distinct visual identity, with an art-space-like aesthetic.

We created a throughput efficient ‘open-world’ operating model where each room represented a scene from the books, and we chose a selection of properties that mixed the well-known titles with some of the more obscure works that contain so much amazing visual material. We set an objective that each room had to be stunning visually, had to be tactile and interactive, and had to have an element of surprise. The Dr Seuss Experience first opened in Toronto to 175,000 visitors and was featured as one of the world’s coolest places by TIME magazine.