Celebrate Engineers Week 2025 with P2S

For Engineers Week, we’re shining a spotlight on Elizabeth Garras, a mechanical engineer and studio leader from our Seattle team, whose creativity has brought a unique tradition to P2S—custom Engineers Week stickers! Since 2022, Elizabeth has designed these one-of-a-kind stickers to celebrate engineering in a fun, personal way. This year’s design, themed “Throwback to the Future,” blends 80s retrofuturism with a bright, forward-thinking vision.

Read our Q&A interview with Elizabeth to learn more about her journey, her creative process, and the inspiration behind this year’s sticker!

1. How long have you been designing Engineers Week stickers?

My first Engineers Week sticker was in 2022. This is just the fourth sticker in the series!

2. What inspired you to start designing these custom stickers? How has the tradition evolved over the years?

In early 2022, P2S Vice President Brad Lentz, who leads our Seattle office, challenged the DOPE* team to come up with a way to celebrate Engineers Week as a way of using the occasion as a week-long celebration of engineering and our role in the industry. Our team was given the goal of doing something special each day. We thought up a bunch of ideas that would work well with an in-person event (highlights include “Building it Better with Bagels” and “Donut forget QC!”) but we struggled with coming up with something for Friday when most folks work from home. I had never designed a single sticker before, but I have always liked stickers and so I spoke up and said I could doodle something for a sticker to hand out. That first year, I received some pushback at the idea—people didn’t know what to expect from me. Heck, I didn’t know what I was doing. But I had an iPad and gumption, so I went for it. That silly lil robot design was a hit, and I loved making it so much that I haven’t been able to stop making stickers since! Each time we want to celebrate something in the office, I now whip up some more stickers. The highlight of every year is definitely the Engineers Week stickers!

*(The P2S Department of Planning Events (DOPE) Team are volunteers who meet monthly to plan and coordinate on and off-site employee activities. Some of the fun the DOPE Team organizes are monthly Meet & Eats and social nights, quarterly charity and community volunteer events, and more.)

3. Can you explain this year's design and the inspiration behind it?

This year’s design theme is “Throwback to the Future." The style is 80s retrofuturism—a little bit Tron, a little bit cyberpunk, a little bit vaporwave. We’re imagining a future that can be bright enough to shine through whatever darkness surrounds us, and P2S can be at the heart of that narrative.

4. What excites you most about being an engineer? How does your passion for creativity tie into your role at P2S?

Art is also about taking concepts and ideas and translating them for another audience. My laptop is covered with stickers, both my own designs and also designs from other artists I love. When someone looks at my laptop, they get a little picture of who I am and what I am about. I don’t need to say anything to be in conversation with the viewer of my laptop, or the viewer of my Engineers Week sticker for that matter. Consulting engineering has a lot of similarities to art in this way. We are in conversation with the plan reviewers, owners, and contractors when we send them our drawings and engineering analysis. They need to be able to understand what I mean by the lines on the page so that they can understand what is going to be built and what to build. My favorite thing about engineering is using my communication skills in combination with my engineering reasoning skills to both come up with logical solutions to engineering problems and help anyone and everyone understand that solution.

When I’m not making stickers, I use my drawing skills in my engineering. Sketches I’ve drawn on my tablet have made it into slide decks I’ve used for both internal and external meetings. One of my favorite examples of this was a training slide deck I made called “Dry Docks 101,” where I used the metaphor of a giant bathtub to help describe what a dry dock is. The picture I drew of a bathtub with the toy yellow submarine helped create a familiar frame of reference for people to help them understand my drawing of a dry dock holding a real submarine.

5. Your stickers are so unique and personal—how do you incorporate themes from P2S or the broader engineering field into your artwork?

The goal I set for myself with the Engineers Week stickers is to try and hide as many little references to what we do here at P2S as possible. It’s important to me that we recognize that all of us at P2S are in the engineering industry, whether we are engineers or not, so I like to incorporate things that are more universal—for example, most of us have used a clipboard at some point or another. I also like to do something that ties us to the geographic locations we are located in; as a lifelong Seattleite I like to bring a little Seattle flair in whenever possible.

As part of the theme this year I wanted to highlight the building that houses the Seattle P2S office located at 1201 Third because it’s part of my own engineering journey. One of my biggest inspirations, as a mechanical engineer with a crafty and artistic side, is my mother. Not only has she never met a craft that she couldn’t excel at and teach to others, but as a mechanical engineer, she designed the shell and core plumbing for 1201 Third when it was first built circa 1988 (shoutout to the 80’s theme!). As long as I can remember, my mom has never failed to point out her skyscrapers in images of Seattle, and so I grew up knowing that someday I too could design things that would have a physical presence.

6. What message or feeling do you hope your stickers convey to the P2S team during Engineers Week?

I want people to see the Engineers Week sticker and smile. I want them to feel a connection with something in the sticker that makes them feel seen in some way. And above all else I want them to feel proud that they are an engineer representing P2S!