Design project: Retro wedding shower invitations

It's awesome when you have a close friend who happens to be a guy, because when he meets "the one" you instantly inherit another best friend. So I can say in this blog post that I got to design wedding shower invitations for two of my best friends who are getting married next month.

When the other hostesses and I met to plan the shower details, Amy had already done a great job researching a few themes and we all decided the retro beach/pool party idea sounded like a winner.

As I started to design the invitations, the color palette was an easy choice because we had talked about using Torry and Nicole's wedding colors (mustard and navy) for consistency, but also adding some red to make the party just a little bit different. I also decided to use very little beach or pool design elements just in case our theme turned into mostly just a retro theme in general.

For whatever reason, my very first thought was to use an old school hotel type sign annoucing the party. But I still needed a little more inspiration so I looked at a few retro beach movie posters for fonts and an overall style that I should use. Finally, I googled slang terms used in the 1950s and 60s that I could drop in for added nostalgia and that's how it all came together.

We sent them off in beautiful matching yellow envelopes and I'm hoping they made quite the splash in everyone's mailboxes!

Design project: Bridal tea invitations

A month or so ago I was approached about designing bridal tea invitations for a girl who's getting married soon down in New Orleans. The client wanted the invite to be "tea" themed since they were going to be holding an actual tea for Claire—the possibility of hats included!

So I pulled the beautiful shade of green Claire is using for her wedding day and a couple of other colors suggested by my client, grabbed a few tea appropriate images and viola! A lovely ladylike tea invitation was created.

Plated: Simple and southern

Recently I was given two easy requirements for invitations my mom needed for a wedding shower she was hosting: create something southern and use the colors turquiose and brown.

Easy enough!

Luckily I had already been working on some pretty amazing invitations for my friend Lauren (expect a plated post on hers later next month!) and she was keeping things elegantly southern, so I was able to swipe the fonts I used for her invite.

Then all I needed was a southern image. What else could I use other than a magnolia?

Add in the colors requested and viola, a simple and southern wedding shower invitation. See final achieved product below.

What do you think? Sweet and simple? Or plain and boring? 

Plated: Jake & Kristin

So this inspiration board is just a tad bit random. Ok. It's a lot random. But this is sadly just how my brain works sometimes. I was asked by one of my favorite clients recently to create a shower invitation and all I was really told
was "shades of purple." Which immediately conjured up the thought of a Grapico in my mind for some reason
(fat kid?!). So I went with it.

For some reason, even though I do not know her at all,  I got the impression that the bride was not a super girly girl.
So I wanted the invitation to be feminine enough to say bridal shower, but not too much. Which meant I ended up
taking the majority of pattern inspiration from an iphone cover I had seen on this website last week. For some reason
I thought I could tweak it and it would work. I made the outlining circles "squiggly" which immediately made me
think of the Spirograph arts and crafts game we had when I was growing up.

At the last minute I felt something was missing, so I added the bride and groom cake topper and I think I am a fan
of the final product! And it turned out that the pattern I created for her was extremely close to the pattern on her
actual wedding invites. I love it when I have that rare design intuition. So glad it all worked out.

What do you guys think?!

Plated: A beachy keen wedding

When one of my favorite clients asked me to create her brother's rehearsal dinner invitations with a beach theme, I knew exactly where to look for inspiration—Jake & Jodi's wedding photos. Jodi is one of my running partners and last April she and Jake were married at the beach. I remembered ooohing and ahhing over her photos with my other running pals last summer, so I knew they would be exactly what I needed to create my own beachy keen wedding rehearsal invites.

See, a beach theme is tricky. You could take it way too far and it will look like a one of those badly decorated condos in PCB. But I knew that Jodi had mastered what she calls "classic and clean beachy, without the tacky in-your-face beachiness" and that if I just looked to their wedding for inspiration, that I should come out pretty good.

So here's the final product. I used the blues, greens and tans, which is what my client already wanted. But then I loved the burlap shown above, so I recreated that texture in the bottom design element of the invitation. And I also liked the whimsical, yet not too fancy font in all of their signage so I found something a similar to use for the bride and groom's names.

What do you think? Did I achieve a clean and classy beachy keen invitation?

Photography above taken by 3 Photographers
Click here to see more photos from Jake & Jodi's beautiful beachy keen wedding

Plated: HIMYM and WWWD

I knew from the second I saw the WWWD Go Buy Now: Heart Prints post that I wanted to do something with a heart pattern in a graphic design element. It just so happened that I was approached to do a wedding shower invitation this week and since I had tucked that heart nugget of information away, it came in handy for inspiration!

I've also been spending entirely too much time with the TV series How I Met Your Mother these days (just ask my friends, they'll tell you I reference and quote it way too much). I got the first five seasons for Christmas and if there's any down time in my life, I immediately press play on the DVD player. Recently I saw the epi where Ted picks up the yellow umbrella that belongs to his future (which we have still YET to find out who she is).

So as I was thinking about the wedding shower invites and hearts I also thought about using an umbrella for a real rain shower and I decided that as cheesy and easy as it might seem, I still wanted to put those images all together and see what the outcome would be. It was just good fortune that one of the wedding colors was yellow, so I could use that for the umbrella. See invite below.

I think they turned out great and I love them, even if they are a bit lovey-dovey and over-the-top girly. What do you guys think? Adorable and cute? Or is it too much mushy yucky love stuff?