Pecha Kucha Night

I guess it's about time I talk a little about Pecha Kucha Night. I am on the coordination team for the Bemidji chapter of this fun, creative, community-building event, and as such, Evensen Creative is a sponsor. I love it. Basically, PKN is an event where people come together and talk about cool things, but they do so using this specific format of 20 slides, each timed out to exactly 20 seconds. It's fast, fun, and contagious.

I was first introduced to the Pecha Kucha format in grad school, where it's gaining more and more of a foothold as the months tick by. In many fields, such as Design, grad school seems to be comprised almost entirely of presentations, and the PK format forces people to harness two major concepts that may otherwise elude them: brevity and concision. I had done several PK presentations in academia before I ever even attended a PKN event, which got me to want to make it a bigger part of my life.

Bemidji's Pecha Kucha group recruits local designers to design each event's poster. One of my duties as a coordinator is to recruit and communicate with these people, and once in a while I take a stab at it, myself. I took it upon myself to design this month's poster, mainly because the production had to get done over the late-December holiday period, and designers tend to be pretty busy during that time as companies try to spend their marketing and advertising budgets. I did the same thing last year, in fact. I used a type-only design inspired by the letterpress-esque New Year's card I did a few weeks ago. Since most people have never heard of PKN and describing it can make folks think there's a sales pitch at the end, the key to these posters is to have them really draw the eye and make it apparent that Pecha Kucha Night is, above all other things, fun.

See past PKN: Bemidji posters here
See global PKN posters here
See more posters of mine here

above: my poster for PKN Bemidji #10