A picture speaks a thousand words – while we are not very sure about the origin of this phrase, we definitely know about its origin at FusionCharts. It’s been here right from the day we started. We decided to take it a step further when for every team member’s birthday, we decided to add a picture gift to the standard fare of cake, gift and card.
Here’s what happens. At our Kolkata office, every time someone has a birthday, the whole team of fifty gathers in the boardroom (yeah, we take our birthdays that seriously 🙂 ) in the evening for the cake and card. Also, there is a lot of cake smearing on the birthday boy or girl who are then made to pose wearing the shirts gifted to them. Finally, there is some poking on their plans and resolutions for the year ahead.
While all of this is happening, we put out a special picture gift specially created for the birthday boy on the screen just behind them. Created by our design team itself, these pictures have become so talked about that people wait for their birthdays just to see what images are created for them. Never mind the pizza bills they have to pay for fifty odd people who can well….eat…a LOT. We have been having a lot of fun with these pictures, so we thought why not share some of that with you? Here’s your serving.
This one is tougher, isn’t it?
Well, Ranajit is a people’s person (his work needs him to be, to be honest) and that’s why the names of people he talks to have been meshed together to create this lovely gift.
Table of Contents
The early days
When we started off with this, the picture gift was a combination of floral design and the member’s name in big and bold. I got one of them for my birthday too. It feels pretty nice to see your name in a big font on a big screen, I must say. While these were neat, we felt that it could be made more personalized to make it even more special for the birthday boy/girl.The latter days
Just like our products, we iterated quickly with the birthday images as well. So for the birthdays next up, we decided to draw heavily from the person’s daily life at FusionCharts. It’s not too hard to guess what Arup does from this one, is it? Let’s try another one.The current day
The pictures reflecting what the members do in the organization were super neat, but we decided to push it even further. As I talked about in our post on the making of our About page, everyone at FusionCharts has their quirks. So we thought why not reflect these quirks in the birthday gift? The reason they have been given the soldier look is still a private joke between the design team and them. For me, the “From FusionCharts archive” addition at the bottom is the best part. Here’s another one.Doesn’t need an explanation, does it?
When the design team created these, the birthday boys were ecstatic. People wanted to celebrate their birthdays again just to get one of these. Everyone loved them as they brought out the best side of FusionCharts – humor, friendship and making everyone feel special.