Wedding Blog

Compromise can be a bad word, or it can be the best thing ever. In a recent post, I talked about the fine line between expressing yourself and alienating your guests. Some people choose to walk it, and others choose to place themselves squarely on one side or the other. Mr. Mary Jane and I chose to walk the line… just a little.

Before I show you our design, I’ll show you our inspiration. First, recall my original inspiration, the Mascaras’ Save The Dates.

I was all set to create that design… and then I saw these.

[source for both images above]

And I loved ’em. It was time to get to work.

I wanted to retain some of the style elements of the Ceremony invitations and a throwback to our picnic paper products, and my first crack at Photoshop design really reflected this. Then Mr. Mary Jane and I agreed that the large font (Inked God) was a little too overbearing for this announcement. We do plan to put a wedding photo of us on the front of the announcement and from what we’ve seen, our wedding doesn’t really reflect a splattery, grungy style. The smaller cursive font (CAC Pinafore) was OK, but I wasn’t thrilled with it.

And then I realized that there was really no reason that these had to reflect the other paper products. These were entirely different, and most of the people receiving these had not received any of the other stuff. After those realizations, I changed up the fonts a lot until I finally came up with a combination we both liked: Veteran Typewriter for the small font, and Jellyka Saint-Andrew’s Queen for the big one.

Here are those first two iterations: the “throwbacks to old designs” on the left, and the new one on the right.

And yes. There are spelling errors. It’s a mock-up. Don’t hate! So I got all of this done and I… just wasn’t really feeling it. That’s when Mr. Mary Jane and I had that conversation about the wording, and he said [paraphrased]: “I’d just say: ’We got married, thanks, bye.’ I’m not used to this ’pleased’, ’knot-tying’, or ’unifying-of-family’ gushy-ness.”

Feeling snarky, I mocked him up an ’ideal’ announcement. (The blurred stuff on top is our last name/street address.)

To my surprise, I really liked it. It was so simple and to the point. Perfect… almost! I decided to try again with something a little more. [The "lived happily" font is called "Jane Austen", and was also used for our names.]

Neat. Picture that arriving in a nice envelope with a photo of us on the opposite side. I can’t take credit for the genius of the 09³… That was Mr. Mary Jane’s idea. We’ve got it engraved on our wedding rings, too!

But… is this one little card really enough? What about my inspiration design, with all of its foldy-ribbony goodness? I decided to try to carry through the simple design of the postcard to the more interesting layout of the folded style. Here is the result.

I haven’t actually printed anything yet because I’m still undecided about what design to use. Should we use the final accordion style (the picture directly above this paragraph)? Or crisper 09³ postcard style?

As with the ceremony invitations, I used the following free Photoshop brushes: Damned Hearts and Vector Hearts, both from brusheezy.com. And all of those free fonts came from Dafont.com.