In April of 2009 I asked my girlfriend Melissa to marry me. Luckily for me she said yes, but what followed was a quick five-month hustle to get the wedding in order. That of course included the invitations, party favors, and loads more we had to complete — and pay for — in little time.
The first up was the invitations. I designed a roughly 5 x 7- inch card to be mailed out. With our tight budget, it had to suffice for the response card, the directions, registry, and hotel information. We were hell-bent on letterpressing the cards, so multiple runs were not an option.
That’s where the web site came in. After customizing a WordPress blog, I added an RSVP plug-in which linked to a Google Spreadsheet containing all the guests’ names. A unique code was hand-written on each invitation which when entered on the web site would automatically update the invitation list.
The invitation was printed on 120# white card stock, in two colors, typeset in Fling and FF Meta.
While that solved the dilemma of excessive envelopes and replies and dual stamps and multiple cards sent, and the web site handled the questions and registry, the program needed to be printed, too.
The idea was to create a custom look that represented the two of us, but the program also had to a) stay in the family of designed c
ollateral b) tell the fun story of we met and c) be inexpensive to print. The result was a 12-page inside, laser printed onto Newsprint Aged 70# text from French Paper.
The covers were Newsprint Aged 80# cover, the back left blank and front also letterpressed — using the same die for “Melissa and Kyle” that was used for the invitations. The rest of the die from the invite was merely ground down. We printed 100 programs, with the guts costing $12 to print and the cover $80.
A French stitch was requested to bind the booklets, but with little time remaining, we opted for two staples, covered by a colored ribbon. The booklets covered the order of events, small bios on each other, and some traditions in which we were partaking.
Last up was the wedding favors. After finding small Chinese take-away boxes in our wedding colors, we loaded each one up with Swedish Fish, adhered a ribbon and covered the ribbon ends with a small badge that looked like the cover of program, but with our first names.
All in all, the wedding was a huge success. The wedding web site got all the traffic, and we were able to update guests about changes or easily point people to our registry. The RSVP system worked like a charm, and the identity we created for the wedding went over well.
