Invitations continued

I say I'm going to post something the next day, and then it takes me over a month to actually do it... Here are some shots of our invites. The quality of these images are not so good. In hindsight, I should have had our photographer get some shots, while we had her in our power.

Folded up, referencing our Save the Dates

In the process of unfolding (I'm trying to give the full experience)

Lots of info for those not inclined to use the internet

Not the most accurate map, but people should really just use the internet.
Grandparents, let that be a lesson to you.

Flip side: the Alphabet poster that took a large chunk of my life to illustrate
The letters G, S, and T are supposed to coordinate with the itinerary on the other side.
Don't know if that was clear.


I do like to design me some icons


Personal stories surrounding the alphabet.

Wedding invite and tourist brochure

RSVP cards -- Rob lobbied to use the phrase "meal of food"

Weeks later, Rob pointed out a typo. My instinct was to get really angry at him, then cry. It was a small misspelling, but it's enough to annoy me for all of eternity.

My intention is to turn this into a more generic poster for Door County and to seek my fortune in the gift shop circuit (that will hopefully cover cost of production). This time, there will be no misspellings.

Wedding Invites and Throwing Stars

I had kind of cut myself off from reading any wedding blogs a few weeks ago to keep things sane. But I cheated and peaked at Green Wedding Shoes this morning, where I found examples of some awesome new invites from Studio on Fire and someone I previously had not seen, Erin Jang.

Ms. Jang does some handsome and clever work. And her type takes my breath away (and type really can do that -- take breath away).

I like the carnival-esqueness to this, like your organist should be the bearded lady and the ring bearer the two-headed boy, bride and groom depart on elephant...

I would keep this program if I went to their wedding

This type is gasp-worthy

When I kicked off design of my own invites, I did a lot of hunting for inspiration and image loading. I was finding a lot of the same stuff out there -- birds, big blooms, everything letterpressed -- lots of pretty stuff, but not especially thoughtful, so most just blended together. Once in a while something would really blow me away, and it was more often than not from Studio on Fire.

Here are some more recent pieces:

This pattern is somewhat unexpected for a wedding invite

It's all bird-trendy, but this type is so handsome



Not a wedding invite, just cool

I need to get my act together and photograph our finished invites. I'm really happy with how they turned out. Here's a preview of the folded and packaged piece, pre-envelope stuffing:

A Better Weekly Weird: American Society for Social Hygiene

I wasn't totally sold on the 'weirdness' of yesterday's Weekly Weird, so I thought I would redo it by posting this public service announcement I found via Studio on Fire. They used it to advertise their birth announcements :)

Beware the autorides.

Speaking of Studio on Fire, if you want to see some truly inspiring and beautiful letterpress design from a nice, respectable Midwestern design shop, check out their blog, Beast Pieces. Here's a sampling of their cool work:

Love how the solid color block brings out the texture on the Crane's Lettra

Pretty wedding invitations -- I like non-traditional wording and format

Fuck you, Gocco

So I had a gocco disaster when I tried to print our save the dates a while back. It really wasn't Mr. Gocco's fault as I soon learned the intended design was totally inappropriate for the medium, but I was still angry with him.

To add to the mess, I also lost a goodly number of freshly addressed, lined, and stamped envelopes out of my car window when I was in an accident last month. I thought these were fated to never go out.

But my luck changed. I'm fortunate to have a generous matron of honor and mother that helped redo things in a matter of a couple hours. I had other offers of support (thanks, Betsy!) which warmed my heart. And it turns out that the combination letterpress-offset cards look beautiful.

My moo-cow creamer, who also survived the crash, makes his debut on this blog

printed with all soy-based inks

paper is Mohawk Superfine Eggshell-finish White (manufactured with windpower)

liner paper is French Mod-Tone Violet (wish I had a better picture)
envelopes are Paper Source Khaki, sized A6

And as for Gocco, we will hopefully be more successful printing our thank you notes, so he can redeem himself in my eyes.

Save the Date paper

I hit up Paper Source this weekend for two reasons: 1) to see if they happened to have any last remaining Goccos in stock (yeah, right), and 2) to check out paper for our Save the Dates (a more successful venture).

We both like the combo below, but the liner paper is super expensive and would take up a hefty chunk of our invite budget. I'm still going to look around...

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Love it

Vera Wang for William Arthur laser-cut and embossed note cards at Paper Source. So intricate. Great colors.

I have to admit that writing on nice stationary kind of makes me nervous. My handwriting can't take the pressure; it's not a talent on which I can rely. I think the wedding might be a good excuse to take a class so I can calligraph the hell out of my invitations and, one day... write expensive notes with confidence.