Created from Scratch
From the creator (Alyse Capaccio):
Invitation choice:
Danny and I decided to design our own invitation. We wanted our wedding to reflect our personalities and be uniquely ‘us’. We both enjoy art and design, so the invitation seemed like a perfect opportunity to do something unlike anything we’d seen before.
Wording:
I’m not much of a writer, I’m better at communicating through images. The wording we used for the invitation is very minimal–just a list of the necessary information.
Paper:
We printed our invitations at the Miami print center because it was the cheapest printer available who could print a large, double-sided invitation. My roommates and I cut them ourselves to save money and to make sure they were cut perfectly (or as close as possible). We ordered a nice coated paper to print the invitations on, but it turned out that the paper was unusable in laser printers, so we chose the nicest available paper at the print center (a silk text-weight paper). It feels nice and smooth, but was a little thinner than we were hoping for.
Fonts:
We decided on a combination of a serif and sans-serif font–a pretty standard starting point in graphic design. The sans-serif font is Trade Gothic. It was my favorite font that year. It looks modern and clean, and the font family includes a lot of variations–condensed, extended, light, and 11 other styles. I technically didn’t have a license for the font, I acquired it from a friend in college for a project. I don’t remember what the serif font was, but we chose it because it went well with Trade Gothic.
Color:
We used eggplant purple and lime green for our wedding invitations and wedding colors because they are our favorite colors, and conveniently they looked good together. The eggplant is pretty traditional as a wedding color, and we were a bit hesitant to use a purple because it’s a common wedding color. But we liked purple, so we used it anyway! When combined with the lime green, the color scheme felt unique, vibrant, and a bit quirky.
Art/Layout:
We split the information into 4 panels: Who/What, When, Where, and Registry. We wanted the invitation to look ‘artsy’, so we painted canvases for each of the panels: I painted the Who/What and Where canvases, and Danny painted the When and Registry panels. Painting was a way we could both creatively contribute to the invitation at a similar skill level (neither of us are amazing, at painting, but we’re not awful tongue emoticon ). We then photographed the canvases for use in the invitation. The back of the invitation is a photo of purple brushstrokes. There is also a QR code on the back of the invitation that linked to our wedding website. We assumed QR codes would be outdated soon, and liked the idea of using this technology to kind of ‘date’ the invitation. Including a QR code was also significant because Danny used a series of QR codes to propose.
We used a purple CD sleeve as the envelope since we are both musicians (especially Danny).
From the creator (Sam Harris):
The main themes behind our invitation were understated, inviting, and elegant. Our wedding colors were black, white, and burgundy so we decided that a black and white theme would keep the invitation clean and easy to read. We created the invite ourselves, using photoshop and various free vector sources. Using a couple existing invitations as inspiration, we tried to keep the invite simple, but hopefully professional. We bought a heavy weight cardstock and simply printed them at home. Probably the most time consuming part was cutting them all by hand. As for wording, the phrase “Eat, Drink, and be Married” was one we found on several existing invitations and we enjoyed the welcoming, lighthearted tone. The rest of the wording is very simple, and the fonts were hopefully evoking a somewhat classy tone, but not overly formal.
From the creator (Jen Schomburg Kanke):
We only had $500 for the wedding (including my dress and food), so I made our invitations myself. We had a deluxe clipart CD, (which was pretty exciting in the 90s!) so we had a whole three different picnic ant graphics to pick from. I think maybe we had someone proofread it. Man, I hope we at least had someone proofread it! The invitations cost about twenty bucks total because I photocopied them at work (which maybe I shouldn't admit even now). The invitation was pretty much all me, and boy does it show!
From the creator (Sarah Harker):
Our wedding invitations were a compilation of the “nerdy” undertones of our wedding (lord of the rings themed borders, medieval style wax seal, celtic knot, etc.) and classic invitation style. We made them individually, by hand, to save a bit of money. The colors of the wedding were a dark blue (TARDIS blue, to be exact) and gold. We tried to keep the language a bit more traditional, because I come from a very traditional family. We handwrote each envelope, as well, to make it more personal. We didn’t have a large wedding, so it was much easier. This was actually one of my husband’s favorite projects. Because brides and their moms do so much of the planning, traditionally, he wanted his own project, and I told him to go for it. It was a great encapsulation of the kind of balance we tried to achieve with the actual wedding.
From the creator (Ellen Cecil):
I can definitely say that I spent WAY too much time thinking about and stressing about the wedding invitations. I spent hours going through various invitation and wedding websites looking for the perfect invitations, but I couldn’t find anything that I thought got at the heart of my vision. I finally reached out to one of my bridesmaids, Jessi Geshay, who has a lot of experience with graphic design (she was one semester away from completing her degree in graphic design before she switched to engineering). She volunteered to design the paper products for the wedding.
It was a very collaborative composing process. I showed Jessi several different examples of invitations that I liked and explained the various aspects of why I liked them. I also sent her the exact wording for the invitations. I had spent a lot of time looking through various invitations so I had a good idea of what I wanted it to say. I selected wording that I thought would convey the fun and happy mood of our wedding day.
The first thing that she created was the EA logo that was used on the back of our invitation and on the other invitation products (RSVP and Save the Date). Alex and I loved it.
She then got to work using the information I gave her to create a few mock up invitations (she created three versions for each draft processes). For various reasons, Alex and I weren’t crazy about the first designs. There was too much color, the fonts seemed static, and there was too much white space. It felt much too busy for what I wanted to convey. I sent her back Alex and my feedback and sent her fonts that I really liked. She went ahead and downloaded a bunch of new, fun fonts and had Alex and I select the ones we were most interested in. We also narrowed down the colors to what you see on the invitations.
The next round of invitations we got were much more what I wanted them to be. The design was very similar to what you see here. The major changes that we made from that draft to the final draft was the color arrangement and a few last touches on the font selection.
Overall, Alex and I were thrilled with the final product. I couldn’t have done it without Jessi’s help.