ChowNow Holiday Party
The ChowNow Holiday party is a glamorous annual event where the whole company, investors, and restaurant clients all come together to celebrate the past year and gear up for the next one. It even made it on Built in LA's Top 6 Tech Holiday Parties two years in a row. In 2018, ChowNow held the party at Harry Houdini’s original ten acre estate in the Hollywood Hills. It’s full of secret paths and surprises everywhere. We wanted to pay homage to Houdini’s legacy, the enchanted location and the classic glamour of his time. I have had the honor to work on it two years in a row, being the Lead Designer and conceptor for the whole party.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Project Manager | Design Lead | Web Design | Event Design
Initial Design Mockups
Taking place at the Houdini Estate, we took its lush and interesting history to create an engaging experience with all the guests, I decided to research into Old Hollywood, classic Casino Royal themes, and the design style of Saul Bass. Below are mockups based on research I did based on the themes, and the concepts I created. We ultimately went with the final mockup as the guide. It spoke to an elegant design with clean lines and sharp contrast between the black, white, and red colors.
The invite
Moving forward with our Saul Bass inspired theme, the first thing I needed to create was the invite email. Since this would be the audience’s first interaction with the event, I wanted the invite to be visually elevated and striking while adding a sense of mystery that would prompt the viewer to want to click through to the website and RSVP. I used lines and the color red to highlight the important parts of the email while still making it look crisp and clean.
The Website
I wanted the website to be a continuation of the viewer’s experience from the email. but give a more mysterious element. To give it an exclusive feel, we locked the site and made it have a password for entry. When the viewer enters, they see the same header as the email, but in a darker mode, mimicking the experience of entering one of the mysterious pathways at the Houdini Estate at night. The dark theme is a mixture of classy and mysterious with the animations and parallax effects. I used a mixture of imagery of the mansion and of the event to denote the modern aspects of the party as well as dynamic, sharp red lines to hint back to the original email invite and to guide the viewer down the site.
Signage
The final thing that the holiday party needed to complete the design was the signage at the party. The Houdini Estate is a vast, beautifully designed venue, so I wanted the designs to speak to the history of the venue as well as the designs they interacted with prior such as the email and the website.
