Engenia Software

Holiday Party Invitations and Markers

You have to wear many hats at a small start-up company, but this was one of the most enjoyable ones I got to wear. I was approached about designing the invitation to our holiday party this year: they had a theme (the holiday bowl), a location (a local bowling alley), and a date. What they needed was interest and excitement.

The invitation - which was hand-delivered to each desk - was designed to pique interest, stand out from the assorted piles of paper on everyone's desk, and to provide contextual reinforcement to the event. The typefaces invoked our product (we use Banker MT widely in our software), the bowler clip art (which I found buried in one of our Microsoft CDs that supported Powerpoint) reflected the scheduled activity, and the hand-drawn holly and bowling ball ornaments were designed to invoke the seasonal holidays. The invitation was also posted on doors out of the building and near major beverage dispensers; They arrested your attention as you approached them. The invitation was responsible for a few worker collisions.

Once the excitement began to build, I turned my attention to supporting ephemera:

The top most item in this image was the prize markers. Each team of bowlers (randomly assembled) were competing against the other teams for lovely prizes. Each prize was marked with a 8x5 placard describing which placement that prize was for. The item on the lower left was a seat marker; the item on the lower right was the team token. Each employee drew one of each marker that determined which seat they lunched at, and which team they bowled with.

The event went off splendidly; the employees were excited about it, and I had requests from the winning team to make certificates of the first place placard with their names on it.