Art Club
How we started the art club at Babbel
1st in the series, coauthored with Liisa and Mauro.
A group of designers are sitting at a table. One mentions that they really liked the other’s social media post of a recent sketch.
A conversation sparks between them: “I really liked your color choice, it was very inspiring!”
Another designer joins the conversation, and people start turning their heads to see what the excited voices are talking about.
“Hey, if so many of us like drawing and sketching in our free time, why don’t we just get together to make some art?”. The now larger group looks at each other, excited about the prospect of shared creative time, and immediately everyone checks their calendars.
And that’s how the art club started at Babbel in November: within a matter of days, a bunch of colleagues that include designers and UX researchers enthusiastically created a slack channel, brainstormed all their art-related interests, and organized a comic making event as the first session for the newly formed club.
The first event was 90 minutes long, starting with a 20 minute speedy lunch while sharing each other’s inspiration, followed by 45 minutes of individual work where participants had to come up with a topic, its narrative arch, and then create the comic. Music on, concentration expressions looking down at the paper, energy rising up as the end approached. We all shared our creation in the last 15 minutes of the session, impressed with what we could come up with with such short time.
In times where you often hear the mantra of “think big, start small and move fast”, the Art Club works as an enabler for the expression of Babbelonians’ artistic sensibilities, offering a safe space to imagine, take life slowly for a couple of hours and share that moment of creation with other colleagues that otherwise would do it alone, or not at all!
So here’s a loud “cheers!” to the self-organizers and supporters of the new club at Babbel! We’ll keep posting sneak peeks of the events here.
