I am so excited to share my very own wedding invites on my blog today. After spending the last few years designing for others, it was a surreal experience to be my own {potentially worst} client. Nole, from the amazing blog Oh So Beautiful Paper, shared our invites yesterday but here is a little recap. And by little I mean really long winded, my apologies in advance.
Our invites were quite possibly the hardest thing I had to do for my wedding. Given the fact that I design wedding invitations for a living, there was a bit of “gentle ribbing” from friends and family about their expectations. And frankly, designing for yourself is very hard! We didn’t really have a theme going into our wedding but one thing that kept coming up was music and the colors black and white. Our save the date was based on the Rob Base song “It Takes Two” so we weren’t afraid to get a little weird. For the actual wedding, I used a line from a Biggie song that ended up being a repeating theme throughout our invites and day of pieces.
I knew I wanted the invite to be focused around a hand drawn illustration since that is what I love to do. We got married in the DUBMO neighborhood of Brooklyn which has some pretty awesome views. There is one iconic street that showcases the Manhattan Bridge with the Empire State Building nestled below; I chose that as our main image to draw. The invitation was printed in two parts then duplexed to #220 and printed on Crane Lettra. One of the important things for me was to have the invite sound like how we both actually speak. We have a very dry sense of humor and we really wanted that to come out in our copy.
For the RSVP card, I created a mini-letterpress record complete with glassine sleeve. I paired this up with a petite black, square envelope and had our return address letterpressed in matte silver on the front. The record was little, roughly 4″ x 4″ so it was easy enough for our guests to ship back to us.
My personal favorite detail was the envelope liner! My friend is a photographer and when looking through her pictures, I saw one of a guy with knuckle tattoos. As soon as I saw that, I knew I wanted to incorporate that same idea into our suite somehow. One I realized that “BROOKLYN” fit on the knuckles, it was a done deal! I really had my heart set on black envelopes so I knew addressing them would be an issue. In came the ridiculously talented Jenna of Love, Jenna calligraphy. She created the perfect look for our suite complete with little details to match back to our design.
We did not do a wedding website but instead provided our guests with an insert chalk full of how to spend a perfect winter weekend in NYC + Brooklyn. This was printed flat on kraft paper.
I finished the suite off with a black + gold twine {from the awesome Knot + Bow} and had a die cut tag created to hold everything together. I love little silhouettes and create one of our hair to use throughout our suite as a continual theme. Overall, we wanted our invites to feel classic, set the tone for our wedding but most importantly to make our friends and family laugh.
The last few bits are from some of our day of elements that we snuck into this shoot. I hope you like everything!
