Humbled Five Times Over

Graduation is coming up in a couple of months, and since I work in the Office of Admissions/Student Affairs, we are in charge of putting several of the events together. My boss asked me to come up with a new invitation this year because they have been rather dull in the past. I really wasn't sure how to create an invitation that was fun but also sophisticated enough to be a graduation invite. So... I just started playing with several ideas until I came up with a few that I liked.

This one was the original. I decided the border was a bit too curly/girly, so I trimmed it down for Option 2:

 The red background literally took me five hours. Someday I will figure out the wonderful world of Illustrator. This version was definitely my favorite, but I knew the color would cost us so I developed a plainer version... Option 3:

After an office vote, we all decided we liked Option 3 the best. Next step? Get it approved by the Associate Dean. I went home that day feeling pretty confident that he would like at least one of the options that I sent over. 

The next morning, I found out that he had deemed my beloved design as "an invitation to Cinderella's Ball." If you know me well, you won't be surprised to hear that I shed a few tears at my desk after hearing this. I took his opinion a little too personally. Needless to say, I wasn't very excited about starting over from scratch since I had already wasted almost an entire week working on the first ones. I took a break for a few days, gathered what little pride I had left, and tried to come up with something more man-friendly. Hence, Options 4 and 5...

Of the two terribly dull options, Option 4 was my favorite.

 And here we have Option 5, which took me all of two minutes to create. I had to throw all of my personal opinions about invitation design out the window to come up with this one:

And which one do you think made the final cut? That's right, good 'ole Option 5. I will probably not be letting anyone know that I created these little numbers when the time comes for their public appearance. I'm just too embarrassed by the quality. But I did learn a valuable lesson here: less is more in the professional world. Leave the fancy, modern invitations for personal affairs.