Designer:
Mei-Lan Steimle

The Marriage Pact match event is an annual college tradition where students take a 50-question survey based on their values and are paired with their optimal “backup plan” on campus. The week-long event relies entirely on grassroots spread via group chats. While this results in a feeling of authentic virality, it proves difficult to communicate consistent information about the event. 

Originally, we designed a flier to be sent alongside the event link, but we found that it was rarely  used. The only design surface area we knew users would see for certain before tapping into the event link was the link preview itself.

This format introduced new constraints on word count: the link preview’s surface area was only 19% of our original flier, and unlike an attached image, users couldn’t zoom in to read smaller text.

We did exhaustive explorations of both visual direction and content. After multiple rounds of debate and voting, we settled on a phrase that explained the user-specific value proposition as concisely as possible: ____ people at your school, 1 optimal backup plan. The design features flashing names in the background to concretize the potential match further.

We hand-selected colors from our existing palette for different school color schemes, staying within our brand while honoring school-specific colors for a homegrown feel.

The scrolling names in the background demanded a high frame-rate and resolution to be readable. The resulting long load times forced us to get creative with gif compression, including cutting out parts of the image that didn’t change.