7 Invitation to an exhibition
There are different ways to invite to your exhibition. If you have time, you should use them all.
Invitation card or invitation flyer
If you are familiar with the layout and design options in one or more programs on the PC or Mac, you can create your own flyer. You can also see whether you can find something suitable in the numerous design templates of the respective programs and then make the appropriate adjustments. In addition, there are online service providers who specialize in offering you an easy-to-understand layout program with many design templates. It gets a little more complicated if you intend to have your flyer printed and the print service provider sets very specific requirements for submitting your document. But most print service providers are prepared for the fact that not everyone with the appropriate knowledge can shine and offer simple layout programs for their part, where you can create your flyer online. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work out the first time. Then try another provider whose program you get along better with.
In general, pay attention to clarity and readability . Creativity in the advertising industry follows different laws than creativity in art. Often less is more in terms of the choice of images and the length and formatting of the text. Colors should also be used sparingly (apart from any images) and not too bright. You can put the icing on the cake of professionalism on everything by choosing up to three colors and two fonts, which you explain to your brand colors or brand fonts and use again and again. You might even design your own logo with exactly these colors.
If you have little idea about these things, then fall back on the design templates already mentioned and use the ideas of other creative minds who are more familiar with them. The more you want to develop yourself and your brand, the more clearly a financial investment can be very worthwhile.
Invitation by email in times of the GDPR
With the month of May 2018, a new era for invitations by email has dawned: The new EU General Data Protection Regulation stipulates that you cannot simply send invitations to all possible contacts at random unless you have received written consent from the recipient beforehand. You certainly don’t have to ask your friends and family members for permission. But if you have created a mailing list with several hundred names over the years and your art is also offered for sale at the exhibitions, then you are acting as a self-employed entrepreneur and there are rules for that. I do not offer any further advice on this topic at this point. I can only strongly recommend you to find out what exactly you need to consider in your personal case.
Invitations as an email attachment
But I would also like to give a few general tips on how an email invitation should be designed. Many artists create a chic invitation in flyer format (see above), then save it as a PDF document (or, if necessary, as a JPG) and send it as an email attachment. So far so good. Unfortunately, however, the associated emails are often very “ugly”, very impersonal and uninviting. In the worst case, they contain no text at all, just the appendix. At first glance, such emails look like a gray mouse in the daily flood of emails, nobody suspects which fancy flyer is attached and the chance that someone will download the attachment decreases rapidly. Because: First of all, people want to know why they should invest the time to download. And above all, they also want to know that it is not spam and that they can catch the virus that is currently circulating with one click. Therefore: Make the effort and already write the essential information about your exhibition in the email text. (It really doesn’t hurt if some data is repeated in the attached flyer.) And explicitly refer to the attachment and explain why it is worth opening it.
Create an event on social media
If you are on Facebook or XING, for example, you can create an event there in just a few steps and invite your contacts to join. This also has the advantage that your contacts will be automatically reminded of the event when the time comes.
Press invitation
When you send your information to the press, you should keep in mind that you can kill two birds with one stone if you formulate your letter cleverly: You ask the press to publish your information AND you invite the press your event!
