Packing for Vegas, Landing in Thailand

People keep asking why a site about a lion's birthday weekend splits its scenery between a casino strip and a set of beaches on the other side of the world. The honest answer is that the original trip did exactly that, in the worst-planned itinerary you've ever heard described at a dinner party. Three nights in the neon, four days recovering somewhere with better weather.

Designing around two settings meant being careful not to let either one swallow the other. The Vegas side leans into gold trim, card tables and the kind of games you'd expect under a chandelier. The Thailand side softens things — temples standing in for quieter rounds, palm trees doing the work that velvet ropes do elsewhere on the site.

It would have been simpler to pick one location and stick with it, and for a while that's what the early drafts did. But a single-city site felt like it was missing the whole point of the joke, which is that Leo can never commit to staying anywhere for more than a couple of days. The back-and-forth is the theme, not a compromise around it.

There's a version of this that could have leaned harder into either postcard cliché, and we pulled back from that a fair bit during testing. Fewer cocktail glasses, fewer literal lion cubs in sunglasses. What's left is closer to a mood board than a scrapbook, which suits a set of games better than a full holiday brochure would.

If you notice the palette shifting slightly between sections of the site, that's deliberate — gold and purple for the loud rounds, a calmer version of the same colours for the quieter ones. Same trip, same crown, different time zone.