whimsical thumb

I think life has finally become familiar. 2012 was and still is a huge year for me. Nate and I recently celebrated our one month anniversary--oh yes, I am a wife! It's been so fun being married to my best friend and I look forward to the rest of our life together. I'm also SO happy and dare I say, relieved, that our wedding is over. Planning up to the day was fun, but incredibly exhausting. I finally decided to get back on this blog as a time for me to reflect and look back on the very beginning of this creative process. Are you ready for this 3-post saga?

Early on in my dating relationship with Nate, I discovered that "N-A-T-E" was in my name "J-A-N-E-T." Imagine my excitement when I realized this... thinking of cheesy things that we were "better together" and that we "completed each other." After we got engaged, I wanted to incorporate this into some sort of design element that would run through this entire theme of "better together." At first, I thought that I could maybe do a play on jigsaw puzzle pieces with the letters of our names on each puzzle piece. Ultimately, I trashed that idea because frankly... we're not into puzzles. I even tried to force the idea by getting Nate a custom puzzle for our anniversary, but I knew it was all a sham. HAHA.

I knew then that I had to take a more abstract direction with our wedding designs. That is when the birth of a logo came about one day when I was doodling during a church sermon. Divine intervention?

I'm not sure how exactly I thought of the interplay of hexagonal shapes, but I like it because it reminds me of a honeycomb and honey has always had ties to romance. By the way, after this logo was created, I started noticing, and will probably always notice for the rest of my life, hexagon shapes EVERYWHERE.

Invite Iteration 1.

This was a VERY rough first draft of our wedding invitation. I was really just playing around with colors, shapes, and fonts. I wasn't exactly sure how much or how little I wanted to incorporate the hexagonal honeycomb shapes. This was also when I thought I was going to get married on August 18th, but that's a whole different and complicated story in itself.

Invite Iteration 2.

After the initial brainstorming session, ideas started to become more concrete. I introduced more layout structure and knew that I wanted the text to be on some sort of round interface.

Invite Iteration 3.

I call this the belly band iteration. I was crazy and bought a Silhouette Studio paper cutter just for this project thinking I would use it for many other crafty endeavors (and surprisingly, I have!). I had the (not so) genius idea of cutting out awesome belly bands for every invitation. Little did I know that it took about 10 minutes to cut each band. Scratched that idea! This was also the iteration phase when I designed one of my favorite elements of the invitation suite: the garden rose graphic. I later turned this into a custom stamp and used it throughout my wedding designs.

Invite Iteration 4.

Voila! Here is the final iteration! Although the belly band idea was a fail, it conjured up another, again, (not so) brilliant idea of how to give the honeycomb idea texture and material contrast. I decided that I wanted to lasercut chipboard and layer it on top of peach cardstock. Again, little did I know that this decision would consume many hours of my life. Yes, even more time than with the belly bands.

I hope you enjoyed the evolution of our wedding invitation and you were able to get a glimpse of what goes on in my head as I design and translate ideas onto paper and the computer.

Part II will come soon about the actual execution of the invitation... Stay tuned!