When Marc Friedland Designs the Invitation, Guests Get the Message : Social Science’s Arty Advance Man

They come wrapped in black vinyl casings, surrounded by crumpled sheets of brown paper or folded into envelopes resembling masks, often accented with dried flowers, tied with straw, sometimes three-dimensional.

Whatever it is for, an invitation designed by Marc P. Friedland is unforgettable.

Friedland is one of the city’s hottest invitation designers, turning out elaborate private, corporate and charity party invitations, many one-of-a-kind, hand-painted and hand-assembled.

He’s the 29-year-old creative force behind his 3-year-old company, Artafax, subtitled “Individually created originals for originally creative individuals.”

Whirl of the Party Circuit

That Los Angeles can support an invitation designer is indicative of the crowded and competitive party scene. An invitation must scream from a stack of mail in order to be noticed.

So Friedland has become painter, advertiser, publicist and graphic designer all in one.

“The more they hold an invitation in their hand, that time is what you’re buying also,” Friedland says. “It registers in the subconscious. It’s more of a marketing tool for people. . . . What is an invitation but a great way of advertising an event?”

His much-noticed invitations have included one for actress Molly Ringwald’s 21st birthday party (celadon green paper trimmed with French linen eyelet), the Joffrey Ballet’s spring season opening (a three-dimensional design using cut-out photographs of dancers), a bat mitzvah (done with pink and purple tie-dyed Japanese rice paper) and a wedding (printed on heavy-stock paper in which seasonal French wildflowers had been pressed).

Off-the-Wall Materials

Simple invitations run about $14 each; $20 is average for something more elaborate. The most expensive one Friedland has designed--$65 each--was for an Academy Award party in New York. It was in a film canister decorated with popcorn and soda miniatures and was hand-delivered by messengers dressed in usher uniforms.

Other materials he’s used include copper sheeting, wire, bark, vinyl, rubber and Astro Turf. Says Friedland: “It’s looking at commonplace things with new meaning, like when (architect) Frank Gehry used corrugated cardboard.

“With most of our invitations,” he adds, “you really feel that it’s been handled, it’s been touched, there’s human interaction involved, and that’s really what makes it special. I think people really pick up on all that, on a live flower that’s placed in an invitation, or the fact that the paper was crumbled. In today’s day and age, with all the technology, anything that brings back the richness and the attention paid to something is bound to be noticed.”

This year, Friedland will handle several hundred projects; he’s currently working on 20 at once in various stages.

Not bad for a lively former New Jerseyite with a fondness for bizarre ties, like the extra-wide psychedelic one he’s wearing today from the Hadassah Thrift Store.

He planned a career in public health before he was sidetracked into graphic design. He professes no outstanding early art talent, although he admits his attraction to “weird things” dates back to his youth when he wrote letters on airsick bags (“They fold real nicely”) and mailed them to friends.

After earning a BA in pre-med and psychology from the University of Miami and a master’s degree from UCLA in health education and behavioral sciences, Friedland had a tough time finding a job.

The graduation cards (filled with philosophical quotes) he made for friends were so well-received he decided to make other occasion cards and sell them to earn some money.

He was designer and salesman in one, selling door-to-door to local stores under the name Fine Lines. As business grew he hired a sales rep and as business grew, expanded nationwide, eventually selling his cards in 400 stores. The greeting cards sustained him until someone who received one of his greeting cards asked Friedland to do her wedding invitations.

“I had never thought about them before then,” Friedland says. “I just wasn’t aware of the marketplace.”

But the marketplace was ready for him, and it was through word of mouth that his business expanded and has since grown, adding charity events (which now take up 50% of his business).

Charity Circuit

Party hosts agree that the more elaborate the invitation, the better the response from guests, confirming the adage that you have to spend money to make money. While this is important with most events, it’s especially true on the charity circuit, where more ticket sales mean more profits for an organization.

County Chief of Protocol Sandra Ausman has been involved with fund-raising committees for years. “I see people saying, ‘Hey, we don’t need people to spend that kind of money, we should be giving it back to the charity.’ But for certain things that doesn’t work. To send just a letter for the opening of (the Joffrey Ballet’s performance of) ‘The Nutcracker’ doesn’t work. Certain things require more.”

Since last June Friedland’s invitations have completely nudged out the greeting cards, and he is now expanding to include designing room amenity packages for the new Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, as well as other non-invitation projects in Los Angeles and around the country.

His staff now numbers eight, and all the designing (sometimes done on Friedland’s seven-month-old Macintosh computer), painting and assembling is done out of a loft where the floor has recently been painted in primary colors and abstract shapes, not unlike his invitations.

The location on Washington Boulevard near La Brea is in a historic but hardly chic area of town. Clients sometimes balk at having to go there, but Friedland loves the worn buildings where jazz musicians used to congregate.

Some clients come to him with vague notions of what they want their invitations to look like.

‘Nonverbal Cues’

“When people can’t describe the feeling they want to get from the party, then it becomes very difficult,” Friedland says. “That’s when I have to pull it out of them.”

He also picks up on “nonverbal cues” by noticing what his clients wear, “because it’s all a sense of style.

“I actually like parties that aren’t theme-oriented because you can express in a subtle way that person’s sense of style. That’s very different from doing a Roaring ‘20s party. So I ask the person if they like black and white, are they conservative, offbeat, do they like concrete or organic things, glitzy things. It’s almost like working with them as a therapist.”

But neither Friedland nor the client has final say over an invitation--the Post Office does.

“Sometimes it’s disappointing when we come up with completely crazy things that don’t go through the mail. Then we have to rework things. Lately the Post Office has gotten very mechanized, but we’re still trying to push the limits.”

Nanette Pattee Francini hired Friedland to do the invitations for an opening party for the Sports Club/Irvine, of which she is vice president and co-founder (along with the Sports Club/LA) after hearing about his work from a caterer.

“The clubs are an extension of me, of my personal style, and I like to dress and feel like I’m always on vacation, and that’s how I want the clubs to feel. I had confidence that he would come up with something unique, an art piece in itself. It was our first introduction to the community down there, and he came up with a hand-painted invitation that wasn’t really whimsical, but very classy.”

Friedland worked with Joffrey Ballet managing board member Phyllis Hennigan to design two of the ballet’s invitations: a potpourri-scented plaid and lace design for last December’s “Nutcracker,” and the recent contemporary invitation with pop-out black and white cut-outs of two dancers, one clutching a real piece of orange tulle.

Hennigan likes the concept of an invitation that involves more than yanking it out of an envelope. “Because you have to do something with it, you do read it,” she says. “It sort of says something more to you. I like that.”

If there is a downside to having startlingly creative invitations, it is that it puts enormous pressure on hosts to throw a party worthy of the invitation.

“Once they send an invitation, then it has to be a great party,” Friedland says. “One area where I can be really disappointed, and this might be a complete ego thing, is when we really work hard to do a great invitation, and sometimes people fail to recognize what importance that has in setting the tone of the party. It’s all on a very subtle qualitative type of level. So after we’ve kind of poured our hearts, and they just don’t get the whole thing, that’s kind of a disappointment.”