My wedding stationary
Now that everyone has received their invites (well, nearly everyone!) I felt it was time to share them on the blog. I am very lucky to have two amazing graphic designers in my life, my father-in-law, and my brother! Both were more than happy to design for me, and I was torn between the two (they suggested only one of them design so styles don’t cross over), but in the end I asked my brother to do the work. My father-in-law is extremely busy at work, he travels a lot and works long hours and I would have felt so guilty if he then had to spend his evenings designing for me.
I was so excited to get designing with my brother, he’s extremely talented (i’m not just saying that because he’s my brother – he really is). We are really close and he knows me better than anyone and he got it right first time. He’s in the process of setting up his own graphic design business, and hasn’t worked on many commercial projects, so hopefully my wedding stationary will be a positive addition to his portfolio.
Save The Dates
A ‘save the date’ is a pre-invitation card letting people know you are intending to invite them to your wedding. You only need to send them to guests invited to the whole wedding, not the evening guests. I sent my save the date cards out around 10 months before my wedding. Some people may send them a year before, but it all depends on the wedding you are having. If you are getting married abroad, you might want to give everyone enough time to save for the flights and to book the time off work, so you may want to give more than a year notice.
As you can see from the image above, we decided to design the save the date card around a movie poster, and treat the card as more of an advert for the wedding. It has a 1920s style with the font and arch pattern, but with a contemporary illustration, allowing the design to be new and fresh.
Ceremony Invitations
We sent our main invitations out 5 months before the wedding. I think this is pretty average. If you are having a huge wedding with hundreds of guests, I would advise to send out at least 6 months before, as getting the RSVPs back takes longer than you think! We are still waiting for the RSVP from both of our parents! The deadline is next week!
The design of the main invites was really complicated for us. We had to include so much information. Everything from the time guests need to arrive and be seated, to dietary requirements. As we have offered meal choices, we had to find a way of everyone giving us their options. A tally or tick list seems to be the easier choice, however my venue requires each person to give their choices individually so they can make sure meals don’t get mixed up on the day. This made things so much more complicated as my invites are only A6 so there isn’t a lot of room on the RSVP. After much deliberation, my brother and I decided the easiest way for our guests to respond would be for them to write their name and choices, rather than create a tick list. This gave them the opportunity to tell us if they required a smaller portion, or needed a children’s meal, which is something we offered on the menu.
We followed the same design as the ‘save the date’ cards to keep the wedding stationary uniform. Plus we had such an amazing response, everyone loved them! Like I said, my brother is really talented.
The colour is taken from the bridesmaid dresses. There isn’t a huge amount of colour in my wedding so far. The burgundy features on the bridesmaid dresses, the groomsmen ties, the page boy suits and now the wedding stationary. I’m hoping to add the same colour to my bouquet and somewhere on the tables. At the moment burgundy is the only strong colour I am using, other than a bit of bling with gold and silver. To be honest, a winter wedding doesn’t need colour. You can absolutely get away with white, white and more white. I added burgundy to give the wedding some warmth and move towards the theme I have in place.
Evening Invitations
Finally, we have the evening invitations. We decided to re use the design from the save the date cards, as these were only sent out to the all day guests, so the evening guests had not seen it before. It’s such an amazing design, so was definitely worth using again. My favourite party of this design is the title. Rather than calling it a wedding reception, we named it ‘The Premiere After Party’, it is an ‘Oscars’ wedding after all!
Designing and sending our wedding invitations was so exciting. I couldn’t wait, and still can’t wait, to receive the RSVPs (not all of them are back yet! – you know who you are! 😉 ) It’s all getting so real now. Some days I feel so relaxed about everything, then others I’m in panic mode as there’s still so much to do.
Next on our wedding schedule is my hair trial. This is going to be in the next couple of weeks. I have an idea of what I want, but I’m so indecisive. No doubt I will change my mind many times!
Oh, and I’ve got to go for my first dress fitting. Dreading it! I haven’t done any dieting since January…. wish me luck!
Look out for my next wedding post on how my hair trial goes.
Alex xx
A few days after the meeting we were sent our schedule by email, giving me a full breakdown of the day, and a list of what still needs to be organised, giving us plenty of time to make any changes if we want to. I can’t stress enough how much this has helped us. Not only did the meeting clear my head, it also gave Joe a well needed boost of confidence.
