Milestone: Invitations designed!

With just over a year to go, I've finished designing our invitations. Now you may think that I'm crazy or very head of schedule, but the thing is, I'm right on track, at least in my head.

One of the first things I did was research wedding stationary. One can easily drop 1K on paper products alone and we're not talking about the fancy letterpress stationary either. At the same time, there wasn't a pre-made design that captured what we were looking for. I researched printers and paper pricing. With a 24 month engagment, we should have plenty of time to print and produce our own invitations and for much cheaper to boot. I've heard too many horror stories of couples staying up till 3am trying to make their deadlines only to have them look like crap.

You are probably about to ask "How does one even know how to design paper products?" I've got a little bit of training. In high school, I was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. It wasn't a big publication, but I spent more time on the layout and asthetics and left all the copy editing to the copy editor and our advisor. I always had to tell myself "white space is your friend." And just to nerd it up some more, I went to yearbook camp for a week the summer before my senior year. During camp, I actually ended up coming up with the theme and layout for my senior yearbook. Unfortunately, I never got credit for it because the co-yearbook editor (there were two of them) told everyone that it was all her. I'm not bitter about it, not one bit.

Moving along. I want to give big kudos to Jake. He was instrumental in helping narrow down the design and helping me incorporate the million and one ideas that I had floating in my head. Also big thanks to my brother Harris. He was a graphic design major for part of his college career. I was able to use him as a sounding board to talk through what I felt that something wasn't working. I'm proud of my work and I feel that it represents Jake, myself, and the feel that we're going for. This is what Paula, our planner, had to say about them: "I like the whimsical style combined with the formality combined with the funness!"

Sorry, no images will be revealed just yet. We're going to keep them a surprise for now.