I met Sarah through mutual friends a few years ago. She is a bright, bubbly, enthusiastic person. We both share a love of creativity and her energy really inspires me.I had known her for a few years when she met Jon. He is a bit quieter than Sarah, but he is a great guy, funny and fun to be with. They make a great couple, and I was honored when they asked me to design their wedding invitations and save the date cards.
I was a bit nervous, as this was my first ever wedding invitation, so I wanted to be sure I got it just right. I started my usual process of meeting with the bridge and groom to discuss the color palette for the wedding as well as to determine what theirpersonal tastes were. Once I had a better of idea of what their expectations were, I got to work doing research and sketches. Ialso started looking through my library of type to see which one would work best for the invitations.
Here's a look at a page of sketches....
As I was sketching, I doodled out a fancy "S" and "J" to represent the bridge and groom...
As I moved on to the digital mockups, I brought the cute little flowers and the fancy monograms with me. I wanted everything I did to be handmade by me so I all sketched everything by hand and then retraced each element with my Wacom tablet into Illustrator.
Here are the individual monograms...
And here are 2 unused concepts for the inviations...
After developing a few concepts for review by Sarah and Jon, I took their feedback and went back for another round. They really wanted to keep the invitations simple yet elegant. So I removed the floral elements and stuck with just the monograms joined together to symbolize their union as a couple. We also met with my fabulous friend and all around awesome person, Annie, who owns a local upscale stationery store, The Envelope. The couple chose a sparkly champagne paper with a darker navy-esque blue to back up the invitations. Annie suggested envelope liners to add a touch of elegance to the envelopes. To save on costs, I hand assembled the envelope liners and invitations. Thankfully, there were only 90 invitations to produce!
For the save the date cards, I designed the layout and per the couple's request, we had them printed at our local photo lab (which seems to be the trend these days) so they could send them out as their holiday cards/save the date cards. The final save the date cards printed on photo paper at our local photo lab and mailed by the future bride and groom...
And the final invitations and reply cards...
The couple informs me that they still get raves on their invitations to this day (as of this writing, almost 4 months after their wedding). They were extremely pleased with how the invitations turned out. While I was nervous when I first started on this project, I was also pleased with the results. And like any good designer, I was happy that the client was happy with the end product. It is a great feeling knowing that I could use my design skills to help make my friends' special day even more special.
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