Weddingbee Blog

Where did we leave off? Oh yeah, I had just left the invitation store bawling and decided I was going to take a stab at Adobe Illustrator! As soon as I got home, I downloaded the 30-day free trial and got to work.

There’s really no way to describe what I went through as a I navigated the program except to say that it was rough. Thank God for Google, because I was typing questions in left and right about how to download vectors and how to work with them. I learned to download new fonts, which was cool, and overall, the process taught me a lot! Mainly, it made me wish I would have paid more attention in Graphics Design class in college (d’oh)! Funny how the semester I took that class was the semester that I met Mr. B! It figures!

Finally, I found a useful tutorial here (I highly recommend it to those of you new to this program), and after almost two weeks of fiddling, this is what I had come up with:

Not too bad, eh?

Like most brides, I wanted a few inserts that matched the invitation design.

Here’s what I created for the “Additional Information,” card:

Here’s what the mock up for our “Reply” card looked like:

For a first attempt EVER working with Adobe Illustrator, I have to admit I was pretty proud of myself. Was I sold and completely in love with my design, though? Not quite. I loved the butterfly, which actually appeared by accident (I shrunk and turned a swirl vector upside down), but I didn’t like the damask print. It got distorted whenever I stretched it and for the life of me, I could not figure out how to set it so that the dimensions remained the same. I also wasn’t crazy about the bright green either.

Then, I discovered something else—I’m a perfectionist. I was changing fonts and moving things around every night, never ceasing. I was relentless searching the Internet for free downloads and kept starting over. I was obsessed and every day I was fiddling with it to the point that I left absolutely no time to figure out the printing process. When I tried just printing it at home, it looked awful! It looked cheap and even on card stock, it wasn’t good enough. Did I mention it took like 3 days just to figure out how to save the file?

At this point, I was having flashbacks of my nightmare with the e-party invitations. Ugh.

So, what did I do? I went back to Plan A and told myself to FIND SOMETHING TO ORDER, DAMMIT! Mr. B was onboard, too! His words were, “I don’t care how much it costs. Find something!” My free trial ended and I didn’t even have a means to access the files anymore. Off we went back to Etsy…

Did you try to make your own invitations? Were you successful?