The Joy of Paperwork

              Ah, the elegant form of a…form.

              Ok, there really is nothing elegant or “high art” about paperwork, but efficient and concise forms are necessary. How many times have you had to fill out a form and you take one look and are completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff on it? To be fair there are a lot of things that are unavoidable, and I don’t know if it’s more intimidating to be confronted with one over-crowded piece of paper or a stack of less-crowded papers.

              I deal with a lot of paperwork at my job. I work at a theatre and we have forms for all kinds of things. Season ticket orders, auditions, class registration, waivers upon waivers…all to keep track of contact info for our patrons and volunteers and to make sure our volunteers won’t bully other cast members or sue us if they actually do break a leg. A lot of that has moved online now, but I did re-design and re-create a few forms based on what I knew I needed.

              I think maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much. It was like re-organizing a desk drawer. Now everything was where it needed to be and I could find what I was looking for, and everything I wasn’t using got tossed.

              Here’s a look at the season ticket order form compared to the old one. The re-design is the first one. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a huge difference but I fill these out a lot (unfortunately, not as much this year, due to reasons), and it feels a little simpler and easier to understand. It does have some problem areas in the leading but this is not actually a form that is in use at this time so I can fix it later. Actually, having not looked at it for months is showing me all of the problem areas and now I'm a little embarrassed to share it. Oh well. This one was from a previous school project where I re-designed our whole brochure anyway. (Once again I had to convert pdfs to pngs and the quality decided to take a vacation in the tropics.)

              The next one I did was this donor form we use for our annual auction event. I re-designed it in February and then we never had the event because of reasons. I don’t have an original anymore, but it was similar to this but with a lot more unnecessary boxes of information we didn’t need.

              The other form I re-did recently was the audition form. I don’t have the original for this either. The one time I’m efficient and delete something…

              Anyway, it’s pretty similar as well, but I did it in InDesign (these were all done in InDesign) instead of in a word doc. I rearranged a few things, and added the bit about the felony, and also the space for gender. The felony part was because of, uh, previous incidents, and gender was because that was something I wanted to see on the form. It’s not entirely necessary but if I’m looking at an audition form for, I don’t know, Jordan Taylor, who is 5’8’’ and auditioning for the ensemble, I’d like to not have to make assumptions on their gender. I didn’t want to have a check this box for male or female either, and alienate any non-binary folk out there. That’s right. Your friendly neighborhood community theatre office assistant is looking out for all you enbies. 

              So, that’s it really. I like designing forms because they help make my work easier!

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish." J. R. R. Tolkien