Weddingbee Blog

Do you remember when the car sites first came out with the “Build Your Own” sites? I used to LOVE them and let me tell you, I built some pretty fierce automobiles in my time. I literally could spend an hour at a site building out all the different features and colors to price cars that I’d never buy. From time to time, I do the same thing with travel sites planning made up trips to Vegas, Cabo and miscellaneous cities in Europe. It’s like online test driving!

Oooh! Look, I’m building a convertible!

When I came across Minted, I was immediately hooked. I could test drive invitations! This was totally my kind of site. I could play with wording, change fonts and colors, then I could save them for later. Soon I learned that Wedding Paper Divas let me do the same thing, and I was slowly sucked into spending hours each week building potential invitations. Then I realized something: I still had over a year before the wedding and at least 6 months before I even needed to order. It was time to step away from the computer until at least the end of February.

So while I took a hiatus from trying out invitations, I cruised Etsy and the blogosphere for invites because that clearly didn’t fall into the category of test driving… just research, right? I quickly was favorite-ing and bookmarking invitation suites left and right, so after 50-60 under my belt, I turned to the Baconator for his perspective. I wasn’t expecting him to of much help, but I quickly learned that many things Ioved and thought were whimsical and modern, he thought were girly or grammatically incorrect.

Like my favorite invitation that perfectly matches our balloon theme and had characters that get personalized to look like us? He didn’t like that the background wasn’t one of the wedding colors and while the people are totally adorable, he felt that it made the wedding too casual. It went into the no pile, but I still visit her from time to time online because you can never really forget your first love.

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What about the uber modern and beautiful minimalist invites in punchy and whimsical colors? He thought it was weird that the two of us who are bursting with personality would choose something so plain. Plain?? C’mon Baconator, the beauty is in the negative space! He wouldn’t budge though, so into the no pile it went.

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How about those amazing invitations with our names in lower case? Totally a no go. The Baconator just kept staring at the adorable lower case letters and asking me why I don’t care about the grammar on our invitations when I’m usually the Grammar Police. So those were added to the no pile, too.

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So which ones did he like? Invitations with lots of different fonts, particularly ones that had serifs or a Western lean. He’d also rather not have images as the key design elements, and would prefer to let the font be the interesting aspect. If he could have had 20 fonts on a page, he’d be so excited and order it on the spot. I pretty much think that looks busy and isn’t really my style. We are definitely both going to be doing some compromising on invitations to determine which ones really represent us.

Are you and your FI picking out invitations together? What opinions surprised you?