Wedding Invitation for Janelle and Jeffery

I've mentioned before that designing wedding invitations are some of my favorite projects. They feel more like fun than work! I'm especially honored when a past bride and groom recommend me to their friends. This was the case with Janelle and Jeffery. They were looking for a classic elegant invitation and response card to compliment their wine-colored October wedding, and were open to my ideas.

I presented three different designs and they selected the one focusing on their names with a hand-written style script font and elegant lines. This was fun for me, because I've been wanting to design an invitation like this.

The ink is burgundy and brown, printed on ivory paper with matching envelopes. Sometimes simple elegance is best.

 

Congratulations Janelle and Jeffery! I hope your wedding day was just perfect and I wish you a lifetime of love and happiness! It was a pleasure working with you.

I Like Gold...Invitations

I had the fun and privilege of designing a wedding invitation suite, using gold foil printing, for a couple in Texas. The sister of the bride contacted me three years ago, via my Etsy shop, to design her wedding invitations, so I was thrilled when I was contacted again. The wedding is today - happy wedding day! 

We started with a save the date earlier this year. The requested style and colors were hot pink and gold with a "love always" theme. Such a fun combination to work with! I incorporated a whimsical script font, a watercolor background and heart, with gold dots and a playful arrangement of wedding details. 

To correspond with the save the date, I designed an invitation, RSVP card, thank you card, and favor tags. (The above photos were wrapped in plastic, ready for shipping, which is why they appear so glossy)

This (unwrapped) thank you card really shows the sheen of the metallic gold foil. I love it! 

This project was one of the most exciting and challenging wedding invitations I've worked on. Thankfully, I have a skilled and very patient printer, who worked with me every step of the way, to get it perfect - even when we had to make multiple adjustments (more times than I'd like to admit!). The complexity of printing with gold foil, is having to set up multiple files for each piece. The example above shows the separate layers required to print gold foil with traditional ink. The intended finished product composite (left), the regular ink (center), and the gold foil (right). The type has to match up perfectly and be thick enough to avoid any gaps in the overlay.

The end result is beautiful, and worth the close attention to detail and the additional cost involved in achieving such an elevated look. Now that I've achieved success printing with gold foil, it's not as daunting as it used to be and I look forward to working with it again.

Congratulations to the bride and groom!

CMYK (not YMCA)

"C-M-Y-K...it's fun to print with C-M-Y-K..." sing along....

No, this isn't a bad version of the Village People. This is me (yellow) and some of my coworkers, modeling how much we love to wear what we do. For those of you who don't know, CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (K is black), also known as 4 color process printing. Our process color clothing was pure coincidence, but was too funny not to take a couple photos.    

I don't have the time or patience at the moment to share a full lesson in four color printing, but Wickipedia has done a pretty good job of explaining the basics here, if you'd like to learn more. Then you get into halftoning and color separations, and that's probably more than you care to know. But we care, because we're designers and we deal with printing and colors every single day. We live and breathe color! Sometimes I have to stop myself from wondering how much cyan is in the sky. Kidding!

 

Here's proof that we do have fun at work!