37th Lễ Bổn Mạng – Invitation Design

This year, I was in charge of Ban Linh Tinh for Lễ Bổn Mạng. One of the responsibilities of this Ban is to make invitations, which were to be printed and handed out to the different communities at our parish.

The criteria for the invitations were as follows:

• Date
• Time
• Location
• “37th Anniversary”
• Both Vietnamese and English
• Simple, but not plain design

I have been out of practice in terms of designing flyers, so I used Canva to aide in my design of this invitation. Creative people don’t always need to reinvent the wheel; we use our resources!

My initial design started out very much like the template flyer. Although I did alter some fonts, it remained mostly unchanged from the original template. I stuck with the color red or pinkish red to represent the blood of the Vietnamese Martyrs, the theme for this year’s Lễ Bổn Mạng.

I received feedback and was told to make changes.

The designs were plain. Improve the design. Change “37th Le Bon Mang” to “Mừng Lễ Bổn Mạng – Kỷ Niệm 37 Năm Thành Lập”
Change  “Văn Nghệ – Sau Khi Thánh Lễ” to “Văn Nghệ – Sau Thánh Lễ trong Sullivan Hall”

Per the comments, I made the revisions.

I Googled search and found a very famous picture of the Vietnamese Martyrs. I’ve seen this picture multiple times as I was growing up so I felt like this one spoke out to me the most. Thus, the flyer received a pixelated Vietnamese Martyrs background and alternating red & white background for the text. It may not be very noticeable but, I also made the Doan name a brighter red.

I received the second round of feedback and was reminded to have both English & Vietnamese. The flyer just received more text.

I received the third round of feedback. I needed to get rid of the awkward bright red stroke in the middle of the flyer as well as make the bottom seem messier with more brush strokes to match the top.

Finally, we came to this final version of the flyer. This flyer was to print on cardstock paper and sealed in an envelope to be the invitations to be handed out to the different communities in our parish. In addition, the flyer was used to promote our LBM on Facebook.

I am very happy with how the flyers turned out. It’s simple and yet displays the theme very well. I’ve received many compliments on the design, so there’s reassurance that this design is decent.

This is a good start for getting back into designing again!