the start of the concept

I’ve received a number of emails over the past few days with people asking me where the concept for my invitations came from and how I created them myself.

The spark for my wedding began with an inspiration board (which you can see here). And although I’ll be incorporating softer, more feminine accents into the wedding, I still love the tonality of this board.

The invitation design began with a wallpaper I fell for. I scanned the wallpaper and, using Adobe Photoshop, cropped out, adjusted & color corrected the botanical line art that you see in my designs.

The script font I used was Porcelain. I downloaded this for free at Dafont.com. The serif font I used was Book Antiqua, ALL CAPS, and I adjusted the tracking to 150 (note: Serif refers to a font that has small strokes or ‘ticks’ at the ends of the letters. Serif fonts tend to work best for body text as they are easier to read than sans-serif fonts. Tracking refers to the spacing between characters. Generally speaking, increasing the tracking tends to make copy look more contemporary.) Add days of back and forth with printers and craft suppliers, a few nights of assembly and one pissed off manicurist and voila…final invitations.

Now, since 95% of my invites are out (just waiting for a few final addresses to come from my not-so-organized-husband-to-be) I will now be switching gears to bigger and better things. Event design! Our venue is undergoing $20M in renovations. What does that mean? Other than driving by the construction site every day, I’ve yet to see what the inside looks like. But stay tuned…I should be in sometime in the next few weeks.

And, one last and very exciting note is that I’m the official winner of Perfect Table Plan software via Weddingbee’s contest! I’m wonderfully excited and look forward to sharing my software experiences with all of my readers.