Remember the entire Oscars debacle when La La Land was accidentally announced as the Best Picture winner when the award actually belonged to Moonlight? Remember when the design of the announcement card leaked online and the entire internet agreed that the layout was RIDDLED with readability errors? Or maybe you remember the time a Citibank employee accidentally transferred $900 million to the creditors of Revlon instead of paying the actual $7.8 million? The review of the banking dashboard’s graphic design exposed how bad design is often MUCH costlier than good design, given the severe impact it can have on societies.
Cut to the year 2025, and to the world’s third-richest man’s wedding invite: Bezos is marrying his long-time girlfriend Lauren Sanchez in Venice, and a leak of the wedding invite just shows how little the world’s elite think about design in general. The card, which looks like it was pulled from an MS Word template in the 90s, has the least creative design I’ve seen as a 34-year-old man who’s attended enough weddings in his life to know what a good invite looks like. At YD, we usually credit the designers, but this might be the first time I’m choosing not to. Not because I don’t know who designed the card, but because this is one of those rare occasions where we talk about the ‘lack of design’ rather than the presence of it.
Image Credits: Jeff Bezos
It’s estimated that Bezos and Sanchez are spending around $56 million on their wedding (although rumors in December indicated ‘falsely’ at a $600 million spend). It’s safe to say that even with a conservative budget of 1/10th that amount, Bezos could put together a much better invite. So what’s wrong with the invite’s design? Let’s get a little technical.
We start with the most obvious lack of any actual information. Sure, Bezos has a lot of name recognition, but does it hurt to put your name on your own wedding invite? Maybe a date too? These seem much more crucial to the invite than perhaps a dress code, or even a location (considering Bezos apparently rented ‘most of Venice’ for the nuptials). The lack of any identifying information really steals the credibility of the invite. More so, the word ‘WEDDING’ seems to be missing from the entire text, too. Strange…
As for the graphical layout itself, it lacks any sort of character or panache. Text in the center, with haphazard stickers on the outside that look like they came in a free PNG pack. Gondolas, feathers, birds, butterflies, all hideously generic pieces of clip art that only an 8-year-old would use. Centrally aligned text in that italic font is difficult to read too, and with just the words UNESCO and CORILA in bold, it really undercuts what the invite is all about – a wedding. And sure, one could argue that a wedding invite hardly has the same impact as accidentally announcing the wrong winner at the Oscars, or sinking hundreds of millions of dollars because of human error… but it’s the attitude towards good design that’s the problem. Fix that and you fix culture.
But hey, the invite literally has the entire design community talking… and that’s what’s so horrendously powerful about bad design – or polarizing design too. It spreads like wildfire, doing a far better job than good design at acquiring more eyeballs. I assume that’s probably why Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket looks the way it does too…
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