This was an invite to a ground breaking ceremony for a new university building that will house The World Languages & Cultures Department. A circular motif was used on both the outside and inside to denote the name of the new building "The Global Teaching and Learning Center". A dial was included on the inside that let the recipient change parts of the text and visuals inside. This building is going to be gathering place for students and faculty who have up to this point been spread across multiple locations on campus. Many students expressed being a languages and culture student felt like that had no home on campus. This lead to the inner wording on the card being "You are invited to celebrate with us at the Global Teaching and Learning Center Ground Breaking Ceremony. Building a home for Languages & Cultures at Utah State University." As the invitee spun the dial it change the word "celebrate" to a different language at the top of the card and then "Languages & Cultures" to the corresponding language. The art also switch from a picture of the building to a picture of a domestic home related to the language. 

This groundbreaking ceremony was for a building that would house Utah State University's Languages and Cultures Department. At the start we knew that our audience for this piece had a few aspects we could design to. The 8 currently taught languages that would be housed there had to be brought in, in a strong way. A sub set of the guest list included the faculty that would move into the new building and each of them had strong ties to their own taught language and culture. Additionally there was a curated list of people the university knew had connections to one of the 8 language families. A large majority of them had either studied the language at the college or had lived in a country that spoke the language. I wanted to help them rekindle a kinship with these language and culture groups. I also knew that we wanted to piece to have an interactive portion to help the audience play with it for a bit before moving on to other pieces of mail. As a theme, the college and I decided to work with the idea that this new building would be a home for students on campus who up to this point had no central location on campus since the programs conception more than 100 years ago. Looking at cost effective options I proposed a dial spinner card that gave some interaction that could change the card to reflect the building as a whole but also feature each language group in isolation. This was quickly approved through rough drawings and I began to make a paper prototype. I used the paper prototype to refine details, with help from a preapproved printer, to create a solid template to work off of.

The cover included an illustration of monuments from around the world that represent the 8 languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Russian). I worked with faculty that taught the language to identify potential monuments that would be both recognizable and culturally appropriate to depict. I wasn't yet sure which of these illustrations would come into use later so I drew them as vectors for versatility in size.

Along with the basic information about the event. My editor and I went back and forth on Ideas of how to incorporate the idea of this being a home for students and faculty. Knowing this had to have some portion of the wording able to change we thought a lot about how to structure the wording to satisfy both need. We chose the word celebrate as a translatable word. The thought was that in every culture there is some word for celebrating as it is a human commonality and as we worked with our language faculty we only ran into hiccups with Japanese, and Arabic, only because the sentence structure as a whole in English didn't translate well due to word order. We worked with these 2 language faculty to find something that would at least make sense knowing that the readers it mattered most to would also be English readers and they could fill in the gap. It ended up being "You are invited to celebrate with us at the Mehdi Heravi (building's namesake) Global Teaching and Learning Center Ground Breaking Ceremony. Building a home for Languages and Cultures at Utah State University. The phrase "Building a home for Languages & Cultures at Utah State University" was used in subsequent fund raising drives. Our phrasing also let us change the "Languages & Culture" portion to names of the different 8 languages. This made sure people who spun the card to an unfamiliar language could have some clue as to what each language looked like.

Knowing that "home" was what I wanted to emphasize, I used the spinning dial function to draw attention to this idea. I did so by making the illustration of the building switch to different styles of homes from across the world. The word celebrate at the top also changed to the associated language.

After we had an idea of how this might look I began to worry that the interaction portion would be so involved that people may loose focus on the main purpose of the card and that was to inform them about the event. At first I made all the words in the card follow a circular path. While in my mind that strengthened the circle motif, in practice it made it too hard to read and made it incredibly hard to create visual hierarchy. I ended up deciding scale was most important to ensure the visual flow in my layout I straightened out the name of the event and information about time and location then made them much bigger than my original design. I also had to shrink the house visual as well for better balance with the dial with the rivet that held everything together. In the end I was sad to have the buildings so small but I was glad I had made them vectors. I was able to include bigger illustrations of the houses on an insert for the invite (pictured above) though this only made it into a handful of mailers.

Overall this was a refreshing piece to work on, it took me out of the typical print media i had been working on for the past year and gave me a chance to make something much more interactive. I had to make a ton of paper prototypes to get down exactly how this was going to all come together. Studying the architecture from so many different places around the world took a lot of time but it was a very fun way to explore the world. After the invite went out I was humbled to hear, from my boss, that in leadership meeting the university president used the card as an example of the kind of out of the box thinking she wanted to see come out of Utah State University more often.