It’s finally here…

After what seems like an eternity of preparation, tomorrow is the day I finally say “I do” to the girl of my dreams. I just put the final touches on our wedding programs and my groomsmen gifts. The only left to do is get through the rehearsal, try to get some sleep tonight and suit up for the big day tomorrow. I’ll be taking the next week or so off from the blog to spend some quality time with my new wife checking out the sites near Traverse City. I did a pretty cool project for my groomsmen and I plan to post about it soon but until then, enjoy a glimpse of our programs.

Little Miss Phone Wallpapers

Way back when my fiancé got her first smartphone I created a custom background wallpaper for her. It was an original Motorola Droid and she had a pink case on it. I created “Little Miss Droid” which was inspired by the Little Miss and Mr. Men books.

When it came time to power down her Droid for the last time and move to her brand-spanking-new iPhone, she was a little sad to see Little Miss Droid leave her life. She named her iPhone “Little Miss iPhone” and I knew she would love it if I made a new wallpaper for her. I finally finished it this past weekend and I’m really happy with how it turned out. There isn’t a “Mr. iPhone” for myself yet, but that is definitely on my to-do list.

Little Miss wallpapers on the phones

 

Designing a Wedding Part 2

If you haven’t seen Designing a Wedding Part 1, I went over how we got started with our invitations. After that design hurdle was jumped, we moved on to our website. Wedding websites are all over the place these days and there are plenty of free templates to get you started. Because we already established a very unique look (compared to a traditional wedding at least) we opted to design our site from the ground up.

abbyandchristopher.com homepage

We started with a splash or welcome page. It very closely resembles our invitation design but with more simplified information. We added our links to bottom to allow our visitors to get to the more specific information they’re looking for.

Our Story webpage

We tried to keep it simple and had only five links. We did one for our story which gives a little background on how we met and how our relationship developed. There’s a page for the locations of our venues with convenient links to maps and directions on how to get there. An accommodation section lists nearby hotels. We decided that an online RSVP form would be more convenient for guests and us (a win-win you might say). The back-end of that is powered by Google Forms. I was able to completely customize the look, which I discussed in this earlier post. Finally, we added a page with links to our gift registries.

locations page of our wedding website

The “secondary” pages all have the same design. They use the top from our invitations and homepage and turn it into a unifying header. The links turn into a simple menu to the left to allow visitors to navigate from page to page very easily.

The whole design is very simple and compliments our invitations very nicely. The invitation directs recipients to the site so we thought it was important to give a unified experience. While it’s not massive or even very complicated, I think it turned out to be a nice little site with all the relevant information easily accessible.

We haven’t made it this far but I do hope to incorporate the designs into our program and thank you notes. As those progress I’ll throw up another post about them. I always think it’s fun to see a whole design package and how all the pieces fit together and this particular project has been extra special for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at our wedding design process.

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.