Wedding Blog

After sending out our fabulous save-the-dates, we immediately began work on our invitations with our designers, Bird and Banner. If I haven’t gushed about them enough in the past, I’m definitely making up for it now.

During our initial meeting, we showed Nicole things that inspired us. One of the few things I whipped out were paper cuts I had purchased in China. She thought that we could definitely find a way to incorporate paper cuts into the design.

Some of the other criteria included:
- needed an insert that included a translated version of the main invitation so that we could have traditional Chinese wording as well.
- allow for easy versioning (i.e. some guests would be invited to both the rehearsal dinner and wedding reception, whereas others just the wedding reception
- include a map with directions
- some kind of creative binding like a booklet, but not a folder

Well, we were blown away at the first round of designs. Bird and Banner provided us with three options and couldn’t decide between two, so we combined them!

Without further ado… our babies.

The whole package. We have two versions: one that includes a rehearsal dinner invitation and one without. The whole design is about texture and paper cuts! Our designers were inspired by paper cut extraordinaire, Rob Ryan (who also has a wonderful blog and a great book that would be the perfect groom’s gift.) Bird and Banner used a combination of hand cutting and illustration techniques to come up with the custom designed borders. We also used two types of paper with different patterns and color tones, which were then letterpressed with the text and art.

Then all the cards were punched with a brass eyelet and hand-bound with a gold ribbon.The Chinese version of our invitation. Bird and Banner provided me with the card spec and I set the type in an Illustrator file and returned it to them for printing.

The beautiful map that Bird and Banner recreated. I provided them with the invitation inserts that Pier Sixty gave me. From there, they used a mixture of hand cutting and illustration to design a map that fit the tone of the invitation. Behind the map are printed directions. This way it’s easy to flip over and skim (if necessary) while driving!

The cards all spread out. I love that the design is tactile yet compact!

The rehearsal dinner + wedding reception reply card and envelope. These were tucked behind the invitation, secured by the ribbon binding. Our outer envelope matched the antique gold of the reply envelope.

I am so happy with them and our guests have been emailing and calling to rave about the design. This was my big ticket item to splurge on being a huge paper fanatic… so I’m really glad I did. It’s getting everyone (myself included) very excited for the wedding!

And I can’t thank Nicole and Erin enough. They were so engaging throughout the entire process. Even though we weren’t in the same state, I was able to email and talk to them on the phone frequently. They even hand delivered our invitations to us to make sure that they arrived safely! I highly recommend them if you’re looking for an invitation designer. They do not have a standard wedding portfolio and custom design every invitation. Check out some of their past work on their site– I used to visit just to drool over all the featured designs. Or contact them directly:

Email: info@birdandbanner.com
Phone: 215.285.8055

Were invitations high on your priority list? Did you design them yourself or work with a designer?