Farewell Ideas for Someone Who's Leaving

Someone's leaving, so somebody buys a card and it goes round the office. You get eleven versions of 'good luck!!' and one person who writes a whole paragraph, and then it lives in a drawer.

That's not anyone's fault. Signing your name is about twenty seconds of effort and there's nowhere for the other stuff to go.

Do a farewell wall instead. Everybody draws them a face.

Why a drawing hits differently

Mostly because you can see how long it took. Two minutes for a quick one, a lot longer if somebody decides to properly try, and on our walls you can literally watch it happen: tap any face and it redraws itself stroke by stroke in the order the person made it. You see the bit where they redid the mouth.

The other reason is more practical. Half the misery of a group card is sitting there with the pen trying to write something warm but professional but funny but sincere, and giving up and writing 'all the best'. There's no equivalent of that with a face. You just draw one.

About a week out: make the thing

Create a wall and name it after the occasion. 'Goodbye Sam'. 'Ms. Rivera's Last Week'. Then drop the link wherever the group already talks.

Private walls are link-only, so yours won't show up in a search or on any public list, and the only people who see it are the people you sent it to. Nobody makes an account, you included. Nobody who draws pays anything either, and a wall for up to twelve faces is free to make. A bigger group means one payment from whoever set it up, not a collection. I think that matters more than it sounds like it should, because the moment somebody has to collect a few pounds or dollars off eleven people, the whole thing turns into admin.

Draw the first face straight away. This is the one bit of advice I'd actually insist on. An empty wall is weirdly intimidating and a wall with one face on it isn't, and yours doesn't have to be your best work.

A few days out: tell people what to draw

People freeze less if you hand them options. Post four or five:

• The leaver's portrait. The classic. Anything from a careful likeness to three strokes.
• The leaver mid-catchphrase, or mid-presentation, or mid-'quick question' at 4:59 on a Friday.
• Yourself, waving.
• An inside joke as a face. The less sense it makes to outsiders the better.
• Their pet. Their coffee order with a face on it. The office plant they kept alive.

Don't over-organise it

The failure mode here is over-organising. The organiser assigns people specific things to draw, chases the ones who haven't done it, picks a theme everyone has to stick to.

It kills it every time. The whole reason the wall is good is that thirty people separately decided what mattered about the same person, and you get to see all thirty decisions at once. Once you're directing traffic it's a card again, just with more steps.

One nudge partway through and one the day before is plenty. 'Two minutes, draw them a face, your phone's fine.' Three nudges is nagging and you know it.

On the day

Put the wall on a laptop or a TV and go through it together, tapping faces so they replay. The room usually laughs at the first few and then goes quiet at whichever one somebody clearly spent an hour on. That's the moment the whole thing is for.

The leaver keeps the link afterwards. Faces save out as PNG cards, as GIFs of the drawing happening, or as short videos, if they want to post one.

If it's already their last day

Then do it now. Make the wall, post the link with 'draw them a face by 4', show whatever's there at the end of the day.

It'll be twelve faces instead of thirty. That's still twelve people who stopped what they were doing.