Students have been greeted by a flurry of red and pink paper hearts hanging from the ceiling upon entering the BYU Bookstore during the last two weeks.
A table set up by the Wilkinson Student Center entrance to the bookstore holds the paper hearts, on which students can write love notes and then submit them in a cardboard box. From there, the bookstore’s creative services, which is in charge of the hearts, will choose which ones to hang up. The event will go on through Valentine’s Day.
Alex Morales, a designer with Creative Services who came up with the idea for the hearts, said he wanted to create something like a message board.
“The walkway is heavily used by students; it’s fun for them to look at and participate in,” Morales said.
Chris Layton, the bookstore’s marketing specialist, said he has seen many creative messages. He said they are about half love messages and half funny messages. Some of the messages included ones to husbands and wives, one for cats from a cat lady, one with Adele lyrics and one that says, “You owe me money.”
Rowdy Symons, the Creative Services manager, said the walkway is fun to walk through and has a good ambience.
“It’s been fun,” Symons said. “It’s nice to know we have some clever people out there.”
The number of hearts to be filled out has been much more than originally expected. Morales said the hearts were originally going to be used in a window display but there was such a huge response that they decided to hang the hearts from the ceiling.
“There have been tons and tons of notes, we are running out of hearts pretty fast; it has been really successful,” Layton said.
Morales said he got a kick out of watching students walk through and taking pictures of the hearts to send to each other.
“I hope we can continue next year,” Morales said. “I think it worked out really well.”
