Wedding Blog

One day I started doodling some monogram ideas in the little notebook I keep and stumbled across a design I really liked. Mr. Bunny and my mother responded really positively to it, so I thought I’d see what I could do about messing with it in Adobe Illustrator.

Here’s the original:

I can’t show you the (very sad) Illustrator version I ended up with after working on it for a few hours. I was so disappointed and frustrated. I knew the basics of Illustrator. I figured I could make it work, but I was VERY VERY wrong.

When I was at the end of my rope, my mom kicked in with her common sense. “Why don’t you call your Aunt Susan?”

DUH.

Aunt Susan, my dad’s sister, is an art professor at a college in Washington. Of course she’d be able to help.

So I bit the bullet and called her. She seemed uncertain about whether or not she had the skills needed to assist me, but she happily connected me with one of her students, who is apparently an expert in computer-generated artwork.

Here’s the first set of options Daniel came up with:

I liked the execution, but the concept was actually different than my original, which was symmetrical script “L”s in front of a standard serif font “R.”

And here’s what Daniel came back with:

AWESOME. My favorite is the one in the lower left hand corner. I especially love the way the “R” has an art nouveau feel to it. It’s just perfect.

Daniel is a college student, of course, and hasn’t done any work like this before, as far as I know. But if you check out his DeviantArt site here, you can see that he’s a very talented artist. Thank you for your help, Daniel! You were a joy to work with!

So far, the plan is to use it on the invitations and on other things. We’ll see where else it turns up…

Did you break with tradition to use your married monogram before your wedding day?