Blackmad Blog

Fleeing the Coop

February 2019

After a little over four years at Twitter, I decided to leave in early 2019. Which of course called for an extremely elaborate party, themed almost entirely around birds and slightly around the color blue.

This was the first party where I’d really tried to have a number of interactive elements. I learned a couple of things I maybe should have known in advance

  • The biggest lesson was one I kinda knew in advance – people can either be engaged with each other, or engaged with the entertainment/show/framing device, but not both. If I wanted people at traditional tables, facing each other and making merry conversation, then they weren’t going to be following every single interactive instruction I put on screen.
  • The instructions/screen needs to be visible to everyone – a lot of people couldn’t see the projection screen
  • There needs to be an audible cue when new instructions come up, otherwise people are unlikely to notice
  • It’s important to have an emcee, or at least someone to make sure audio cues work
  • Seemingly videos don’t play over hdmi in keynote? or something like that?
  • People love it when you print out tweets

Invite

I have never stopped finding the “misuse” section of the Twitter Brand Guidelines funny.

so the invite looked like this

This Amazing CAKE

An ex of mine used to bake cakes to keep herself sane in law school. Now she practices corporate law. She asked me if she could make a dessert.I said of course.

She showed up with this.

It’s a cake that contains as many violations of the twitter brand guidelines as could fit on a 9″ cake. I wish I had more photos of how good this was. Here you can see the old lettermark, an outline applied, a very old logo, and a hint of a gradient fill. Ugh. Amazing. The technique is piped molding chocolate.

The Interactive Elements


The Menu

Cocktail

Photos

I took basically no photos at this party. Did you?