Weddingbee Blog

Alright, I admit it, I’m a Photoshop dork. I taught myself how to use it about 5 years ago for a job, and have been obsessed ever since! It really helps me visualize my projects to lay them out in two dimensions, and will (hopefully!) serve as a blueprint for our DOC (when we pick one) to set up everything as we envision. I will be doing real life mock ups of most of these, which I will share with you over the next few months, but in the meantime I wanted to show you all some of my Photoshop designs, to give you a little preview of what to expect. (I know, I’m such a tease!)

This is a sample invitations suite mock up (note, some of this will be changing, but it gives you a good idea of our color scheme. I will definitely be using the stylized flower and vine with flowers motif throughout):

A closer look at our STD magnets, which will accompany our insanely excessive STD cards (more on those later!):
A mock up of a potential program design:Placecards mock up:
I even Photoshopped the floor plan on our venue’s website, where I want everything to go:
And then I Photoshopped furniture and an arch similar to what we’ll be building onto a picture of our venue’s ceremony location (don’t cha just love the view of the bay through the trees?):

Next up, a mock up of the dining tables looking down. I did this all to scale, with 60″ tables and 13″ chargers, to make sure the beautiful purple glass chargers I found would be worth the 88 mile drive to Sonoma to rent (my mom was very concerned the table would look too crowded; what do you think?):

A close up of a single place setting & swatches:
And of course I had to do side views of the tables, so I could visualize the centerpieces (note, I did these before discovering the lovely purple chargers above). Here is the tall centerpiece:
And the short centerpiece: And the centerpiece for the cocktail tables: Next up, my four tier card box:
And also, favors mocked up (but we might be changing these to something else…):

And signage, lots of signage! These will be the buffet signs:

This is the sign that will explain our nontraditional Wishing Stone guest book:

And this is a mock up of the Gift Table/Guest Book Table:
I also made cute bathroom door signs, to cover the ugly signs they currently have on the doors:

And then there was the matter of our crazy 6.08’ tall cupcake stand that Mr. Cola will be making. I, of course, had to make sure 100 regular sized cupcakes and 200 mini cupcakes would fit on our stand, allowing for room at the corners of each shelf for flowers. Each big square below is a shelf of the cupcake stand, and circles are the cupcakes. Yep, they all will fit! (and no, I don’t expect our baker to set them up EXACTLY this way, but they’ll get the idea from this to stagger regular ones with minis):

And finally, I couldn’t leave you without a peek at what I’ve mocked up for our rehearsal dinner. Since we’re doing a casual BBQ in the park for all our family and out of town guests, I’m going with a Paisley Picnic theme. Here are the buffet signs:

The placecard and sign explaining seats aren’t assigned, but we’re using placecards so everyone can learn each other’s names:

And a birds-eye view of the rehearsal dinner picnic tables all decked out (but I’m thinking of maybe using metal pails instead of the boot centerpieces. And there will definitely be citronella candles!). Well, that’s about it for now! Our next step is to start implementing these designs (and so many more that I haven’t shared!) into real life mock ups, and then the final products. I think it will be so interesting to look back at this post over the coming months, to see how many of these mock ups actually evolve into real elements of our wedding, and how many morph into something different.

Did you feel the need to create mock ups of your wedding creations before implementing them in real life? Do you find it helped to solidify your vision?