Unique wedding invitations are just about the best possible gift I feel I can give to a family member about to get married. It’s not something that I like to do for clients that often, but I love designing them for family members.
I guess you could say it’s another hobby of mine, even though it’s very much related to my business of teaching calligraphy to others. I love it so much.
My cousin Whitney is a very classic girl with a modern twist. I knew she and her mom would have very timeless decor at the wedding with simple elegance, so I conveyed that in a nearly all-calligraphed invitation.
The twist? Printing the names instead of lettering them. It sounds like a gimmick when I write it out like this, but it helps break up the blocks of calligraphy without making the invitation appear busy.
The ceremony invitations were done mostly in text with special little flourishes here and there.
It’s hard to tell from the photos, but the invitation paper is off-white and the printed text is a dark olive green. A slight variation on the traditional black and white invitation.
I didn’t know a whole lot about how the reception was going to go, but it turns out the invitations set the tone for the celebration perfectly. The venue was an old 1800s meeting hall with cream walls, white 10″+ moulding, original hardwood floors and stone masonry construction. The party was decorated wall to wall with garlands of doilies and large center-pieces of baby’s breath. Simple, yet oh-so-elegant.
These are so lovely!!!
I’m just curious what your process for something like this looks like? Do you write out each line individually, digitize and then do the layout?
Thanks so much! It really depends. This particular one I lettered the whole thing out, digitized and made slight adjustments as needed.
Also curious, when you say digitize, do you mean just scanned it in? It seems like it would be hard to get a clear enough image. I would love to do something similar to this for my wedding but have no idea how to get it from being a hand written design in front of you to a digital image that a printing company could print.
I scan and vectorize using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. The key is scanning at high enough resolution.
Really beautiful! It’s not always easy to find a nice balance between calligraphy and computer fonts, but you did a wonderful job.
Your calligraphy is so wonderfully enhanced by adding the ‘clean font’ names. Were I to get married again (impossible with my awesome husband), I would LOVE these invitations. Beautiful work, as always…
So beatiful!