Got flyer?

If you haven't gotten one personally, go to Sproul. If you have extra, pass them around!

Finishing the "program"

Program is one of those unfortunate homonyms that can mean quite different things. On the one hand, there's a line-up we got planned for the entire night: live music, skit, video (two of them!), message, and announcements. As in, "The New Student Welcome Night program is full of some pretty good stuff."

On the other hand, program could also refers to the paper or booklet every person gets when she walks through the doors of Wheeler Hall. So I could say, "The program handed to me tonight is designed well. It looks cool." And, I would suggest, unlike other pieces of paper you found in your welcome folder or were handed to you in an obscure way to answer some questions you never knew you had, the program we're going to give out at New Student Welcome Night will be informative and beneficial.

Hannah and Steve are finalizing the program, and it goes to production tomorrow.

New to this year's program is a whole listing of coupons. They're deals cut to us by our local sponsors. Here's a sampling of the places supporting us:

• Ben & Jerry's
• Chang Luong Restaurant
• Fins Restaurant
• Papamingo
• Tako Sushi
• Tapioca Express

Wonder how we got all these sponsors? Let's thank Kevin for his tireless PR work. (applause applause)

Running Kinko's out of the back room

Even though we're all web savvy and can find just about anything we need between Google and Wikipedia, there's still a need for paper, flyers you can hold in your hand, and posters you can see plastered on bulletin boards and telephone poles.

New Student Welcome Night publicity isn't just word of mouth. Sure, we got a really big banner hanging on the student union out on Sproul Plaza. But we still need our publications, Photoshop, and Illustrator peeps to produce some cool stuff we can hand out to our friends and all the new students on campus.

Let's hear the numbers:

• 10,000 New Student Welcome Night flyers
• 5,000 Koinonia Welcome Night flyers
• 5,000 acts2fellowship Welcome Night flyers
• 1,000 New Student Welcome Night programs
• 1,000 Koinonia brochures
• 1,000 acts2fellowship brochures

Here's the people we can thank for all the pretty, in-full-technicolor prints: Tim, Jesse, Hartie, Kenton, and the whole team of innumerable people folding each of those brochures by hand. And it's not like they pick up all this stuff at Kinko's. They sit in front of the printers as each sheet comes out, hitting "print" for the hundredth time.

And then you have artists: Sieun, Myra, Kaitlyn, Hannah, Irene, and Margaret. One could speculate, perhaps, the reason for the dearth of artists hailing from the alternative gender: maybe they're still figuring out how to color within the lines?

The Winning Postcard

If you're curious at all, here's the winning design that was sent to all the incoming students, Wednesday morning.

Wondering how many we sent? We sent 6450 postcards domestically (that includes the States,
including Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and others). We even sent it across international waters: 471, to be exact.

That's a darn lot of postcards.

Designs that DIDN'T make it

As the publications machinery starts cranking, we got aspiring designers, Photoshop gurus, Photoshop peons, and everyone in between putting stuff together. It's a ton of fun on Friday nights seeing people put their heads together and try their hand at being artsy, creative, and innovative. That doesn't mean we are. It just means we're trying!

Yesterday, after eating at Asian Ghetto, a bunch of people spent 3 hours (yes, you read that right: three hours) putting labels and stamps on postcards so they're ready to get dropped off in the mail.



But for every design that gets the stamp of unanimous approval, there's always a bunch that got the ax, that just didn't quite make the cut. Here's a sampling of those that didn't make it... but we're still appreciative of all the work! Good job guys!

Postcards, postage, and U.S. post offices

Every year we try to greet new students the old-fashioned way: with snail mail. After all, in a world of emails, IM, blogs, and text messaging, few things are as pleasant as getting something handed to you by the U.S. Postal Service with your name on it.

The tough question is: What's the final product going to look like?

Website's finished

After several weeks of coding, tweaking, and finding bugs, at last this NSWN website is done! Hooray for Jon! He did all the hard work. In case you're wondering, this site is custom coded into a three column format. You probably won't find a cooler site on blogger.com!

Time to let everyone else in on the fun and spread the news about this site. We're hoping it'll be a great way for people to find out what to expect the night of New Student Welcome Night, and also to provide a window into all the work that goes on behind the scenes.

In other news, Ben and the publications people are hard at work trying to produce an as-close-as-possible-to-final-as-we-can-get design of the postcard, which we're going to send to all of the new students welcoming them to Cal and introducing our group. Be on the lookout for some of the early drafts which I'll be posting once we figure out how this photostream thing works...

NSWN video trailer finished!

Big props to Andrew for finishing the video trailer for NSWN! We posted it to youtube, and put it on this website over there at the top of the column on the right. The video makes us look almost cool. Now Andrew just has to finish editing the NSWN video itself...

The other stuff rumbling in the NSWN machinery:

• Brainstorming for Welcome Week activities
• Sieun and Myra working on the postcard design (I'll put up some pictures soon)
• Angela applying for our NSWN bbq permits (Thanks, Angela!)
  
• Kenton reserving Lipman Room for Koinonia Welcome Night ( Aug. 30)
• Bunch of people working on the a2f Welcome Night video... I think they're storyboarding now
  
• Got ourselves a table at the Summer Bridge Club Fest on Aug. 6
  
• And, of course, the Deathly Hallows...