20 weekends and counting…and the invitations are done…

I’ve started counting down in weekends now as that is when I have most time to jobs for the wedding. We now have 20 weekends to go… panic much!

The past two weeks have been very busy, with work and family reunions and meeting new friends, all that and finalising the design of the wedding invitations!

I wanted to do the invitations on Adobe Illustrator, but couldn’t really justify the expenditure to buy the software. But I took inspiration from Rock My Wedding Real Bride Kelly Hardman who uses Microsoft PowerPoint. I had never used PowerPoint to create anything like this but I thought I would give it a go. Admittedly you don’t have the flexibility that you would have when using a professional graphics product, that said I am more than happy with the results I have managed to achieve, please let me know what you think!

We wanted the ceremony invitation to be a more formal affair, but we still wanted it to reflect us as a couple, so Neil edited the image we had taken for our Save the Date cards and we made it into a banner to go across the top of the invitation. The font we used was HandTIMES from Dafont.com.

It had a nice formal quality to the shape but the hand-drawn effect made it feel more relaxed and more appropriate for our beachside wedding.

We wanted the Reception Invitation to have a more relaxed and fun quality to them. Initially I liked the idea of a carnival inspired invitation and I had Pinned (if you’re not familiar with Pinterest, you have to check it out!) a few to my Wedding Ideas Pin Board:

These beauties were designed by Erica Miller over at Thoughtful Day, she really does produce some fabulous work. I had wanted to show you what I had managed to create but I can’t find the file. Anyway, Neil felt that it was a bit too ‘themed’ for our wedding so it was back to the drawing board.

I had liked all the typographic based invites out there and so I started playing around. Our wedding colours are turquoise and fuchsia and I’ve used the colours as backgrounds for the Reception and Evening Reception invites. I’m not going to lie, it took AGES, about a month in total, working on them on and off, downloading countless fonts from dafont.com. Here is what we ended up with:

Hopefully it conveys the more relaxed feel we want from our wedding reception. It was great fun to produce however the last week before it was finished I was getting tired of tweaks and changes but I am happy with the results.

And finally… the Evening Reception invite, we wanted this to be simple and bold. I had seen this print some time ago, and loved the quote on it:

So I took the words and the font Grenadier from dafont.com and created this:

And so the invites are designed, we have sent them off to the printers, they should arrive next week!

We decided to use Vistaprint.co.uk on this occasion, just because of their price, we had used moo.com for our Save the Dates but they were more expensive. Whilst the price of Vistaprint.co.uk was cheaper than moo.com it was much more fiddly and complicated to use and we had to do lots of formatting to the images we had created using PowerPoint to get them to fit. For ease of use I’d definitely recommend moo.com, but you can’t argue with the price of Vistaprint.co.uk.

All of the information regarding times and detailed locations are being printed on the back of the cards and we opted to go for Vistaprint’s Oversized Postcard option.

Are any of you designing your invitations? Where have you found your inspiration?

What do you think of the fact that the invitations don’t ‘match’ one another? I like the fact that the different ‘feels’ for the different parts of the day are conveyed in the invites. That and I don’t like things to be too ‘matchy matchy’.

Please feel free to comment…the Blogosphere can be a lonely place at times!

January 15, 2012. DIY, Invites, Wedding. Leave a comment.