Designing a Wedding Part 1

As previously mentioned, I’ll be getting married this June. My fiance and I are both graphic designers, so it was only natural for us to design an identity for our wedding. Any designer will tell you designing for yourself is harder than for any client. As you can imagine, having two designers design for themselves is even worse. It took us quite a while to turn our visions into reality but we eventually managed.

Close up of wedding invitations

It started with invitations. We knew we wanted something different. Something a lot less traditional and a lot more “us.” I think we definitely accomplished it. We opted for a single card design done in letterpress. You can see a bit of the actual printing process in my earlier post about the press check. I’m really happy with how they look. The colors, the texture and even the bright orange envelopes all look great together. You can see more pictures below.

stacks of envelopes and wedding invitations

In part two I’ll go into how we translated our invitation designs into a wedding website.

Letterpress Wedding Invitation Press Check

Last night Abby and I had the pleasure of doing a press check on our wedding invitations. We are having them printed at Ginger Tree Press which is a one person letterpress & design studio in Kalamazoo. It’s actually owned and operated by our friend Anna who went through the same design program as us in college. I’ve always loved letterpress and when the opportunity to do our wedding invites that way presented itself, we couldn’t say no. It’s always nice to keep things local and because we knew Anna, she invited us for a press check. After checking the color and such, we stuck around to watch some of the printing. It was extremely exciting for a couple of design nerds like us. Anna really knows her stuff so if you’re looking for letterpress, definitely check out Ginger Tree Press.

I love just about everything about letterpress. I love the look of it. I love the texture. I love how it feels in your hand. There’s something very pleasing about it. I think it’s extra special. Maybe because I know what went into it behind the scenes, but I just can’t get enough of it.

Below I have a few photos and videos of our sneak peek at the invitations. They are looking really great and I can’t wait to see the final product all trimmed out with the second color in place. I’ll be sure to post them when they’re ready.