When it came to invitations, despite my lack of serious print collateral production, the answer was "DIY here I come!" Now, I'd made concert programs, promotional posters, various cd booklets, and so forth before, but almost all to have professionally produced. As an art student, I'd made a great many cut and glue projects including a multicolor labyrinth-esque cube out of matboard, balsa, and acetate, a pristine white geometric landscape (matboard again), and variation upon variation of black/white or many-hued perfect one-inch paper squares mounted in grids to - you guessed it - matboard. But none of those were produced in any quantity. So this great intersection of graphic design, hand-crafting, and mass production is new territory for me.
The process started with brainstorming designs. And brainstorming for me involves paper, sharp objects, and a lot of measuring, using whatever paper I had lying around. The ideas below were the initial results:
We were definitely against the inserts falling out all over when you take the invite out of the envelope, so we knew they needed to be incorporated into the design of the invite itself. Yes, a pocketfold would have been the easy way to do this. But while I am not a print professional, fiance is, and he had his heart set on something mind-blowing. Unfortunately, I'm the designer of the two of us, so it was up to me to create something sufficiently snazzy.
So, one round of review later, I came up with this:
which is accomplished on a folded card with the open side edge glued shut and includes trapezoidal (or keystone-shaped) inserts hanging in die-cuts on the reverse of the card that keep the shapes from falling through to the inside of the piece. Some other time, I'll get into a step by step.
The paper selection process took ages, many sample books from paper shows,
and a couple of rounds of samples ordered from my new favorite wedding vendor, paperandmore.com. Then I designed the actual invitation portion of the wording & layout, which included four initial options, and then four options derived from the selected original, final edits and decision from us, and a backup option when getting sponsor (dad) approval.
(the initial four on the left, the final four on the right. You can see that the final four are very much in the same vein, since they were derived from the bottom left and top right of the initial four designs.)
As a side note, I highly recommend keeping all of your scraps, when attempting a project like this. My scraps turned into embossing tests, glue tests, transparency tests, calligraphy tests, and for the response card, a what-writing-implements-will-even-work-on-this-stuff test. It's also environmentally friendly not to waste anything...more on that in future installments.
Who's making your invites?
No comments:
Post a Comment