The past year has been an incredible one for de LaB. We've played with
paper and in
parks, drank
Mai Tais and sampled
architectural ice cream sandwiches, rode
trains,
buses and bikes—don't forget our next
dim sum bike ride, May 23!—and even opened a
pop-up store. And we not only want to keep on churning out these fantastic design community events for you, we want to make everything about them bigger and better.
So we're very excited to announce that de LaB is planning
our first-ever fundraiser! This will be an evening event held
Saturday, June 26 (so save the date!) as the evening event for
Dwell on Design. We're having it at the
Spring Arts Tower, a 1915 building in downtown Los Angeles that's home to over 100 creative businesses, including the offices and studios of many of our de LaB friends.
It's going to be a live show, featuring some of your favorite people in LA's design community (for those of you who can remember back to
December 2008, kinda like that). But to make it truly epic—and in the spirit of all de LaB events—we're going to need some creative input from you.
Our event will be held in what used to be
Citizens National Bank (and later, Crocker Bank), a grand space with mosaic floors, painted ceilings, two rows of pillars marching through the center, and lots and lots (and lots) of space. As we toured the venue last week, we realized there were some tremendous opportunities to show off the amazing creativity of the de LaB community.
We hope you'll see this as an amazing opportunity to donate your time to our cause and have your work showcased at our biggest event yet. We'll be sure to hype every last bit of your participation and list you as an official sponsor on our website, at the event, and in whatever else we happen to produce. Here are some of the ways you can contribute...
- Sponsors or in-kind donors: Thanks to our annual sponsors, Spring Arts Tower and RBD, and our alcohol sponsors Pama and Hpnotiq! We need just about everything you can think of to make an event fantastic. If your company might be able to offer something, from wine to a projector, we'd love to know about it.
- Web designer: Thanks, Derrick Schultz!
- Lighting designer: We're looking for someone who might want to give our stage, and the space, a theatrical look for the evening.
- A/V tech: We're looking for someone who can help us manage our sound, projection and music needs for the evening. If anyone can help us get a discount on an A/V set up, that would be great, too.
- Design installations: There are opportunities for four large-scale (and we mean large: floor to ceiling) art installations. We're thinking these four places could be a pretty cool place to prominently feature the work of four people in our community. They could even be interactive installations that happen on the night of the show. Send us your ideas.
- Bar designer: Thanks, Jason and team!
- Window designer: In addition, there's a large interior wall that faces out onto the corner of 5th and Spring where we can create any kind of promotional display. We're looking for ideas for what we could do here, too.
- Vault designer: There is a vault (yes, a vault, remember, it was a bank!) with quite a large enclosed space that could be transformed into something really fun for the evening. If you've got an idea we'd love to hear it!
- iPad developer: We're looking for someone who's interested in designing a "program," but not a printed one: an electronic, downloadable publication to remember the evening by.
- Volunteers: Thanks, Ashley Atkinson! We're looking for a few more folks who might want to help us on the evening of the event.
For anyone who is interested in contributing, we'll be planning a site visit in the next week or two for all of you to see the space and discuss more ideas. So if you're at all interested in being involved, email us as soon as you can at
hello [at] designeastoflabrea [dot] orgFor the rest of you, we'll see you there! And once again, we want to thank you your support and dedication over the last almost-three (!) years. We couldn't be de LaB if it wasn't for all of you.
