[Taken from the Bristol Design Festival Blog where I have been guest blogging]

It is always a real challenge to try and quantify the success of an exhibition launch.  Do you rank its performance on the amount of visitors? The press coverage? The alcohol consumption? Last night the Bristol Design Festival held its launch party at the Old Fire Station, complete with competitions, prizes, speeches, wine, nibbles, music, and everyone seemingly enjoying themselves.  To summarise the launch though, let’s look at a few numbers…

500 – The number of visitors who basked in the warm glow of the spotlights as the third annual Bristol Design Festival kicked off.  The actual number is still being tallied, but at the point of writing this we reached over the 500 mark.

59 – The number of Grafikea Competition Entries on display.  A massive jump again in both volume and quality of the entries.  Some of them are quite simply unbelievable.

10 – The number of pimped Trunki’s that were on display.  As both Trunki and the BDF are celebrating their third year, Trunki is auctioning off the customised pieces in aid of the Festival.

12 – The number of crates of free wine that that aided the merriment and friendly chatter.  The interaction between designers and the public along with the general buzz of the venue was something that is hard to capture in words.

60 – The number of exhibitors in the Old Fire Station alone.  This year the Festival is able to boast over 500 exhibitors in 30 venues across Bristol.

3 – The number of large bags of munchies that were devoured, giving the public another reason to kick back and enjoy themselves in the hub of Bristol creativity.

6 – The number of bags of ice that were used to keep the wine cool.  A small detail, but as all good designers know, it is the small detail that really matters.

250 – The prize fund handed over to the winner of the Grafikea competition.  The competition was fierce this year but made all the more fun by the massive novelty cheque that Neil Ferguson had managed to acquire.

12 – The number of prizes and awards given out during the party.  This included 6 Grafikea, 3 3D Design and 3 2D Design prizes.  All worthy winners, but there are also plenty of worthy mentions.  To see what ones you like though, come and visit!

1 – In the end all of these numbers add up to a single event.  The launch party, whatever you use to quantify it, was a success.  It had a fantastic atmosphere, wonderful people and as with previous years was the perfect showcase of just what Bristol Creatives can do.

This is not the end though for the Festival.  The BDF will be running all the way through until the 11th June.  If you were unfortunate and missed the Launch party, do not worry.  You haven’t missed the event!

Tags: bristol design festival, guest blogging, launch party, numbers

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.