Earlier we featured our ‘Design of the Day’ – a gorgeous letterpress wedding invitation which was designed by the bride herself – Shelley Rodgers of ‘The Beauty is in the Detail’. Shelley has kindly been in touch and wanted to share with you how she came up with this lovely design. Although Shelley is a graphic designer herself, she shows just how, with a bit of thought , you can design your own unique wedding invitations with that personal touch ….
Shelley – “Originally my plan was to make these myself – I have a decent printer – know my way around a computer and am known to be a little crafty – but after researching other peoples invites on flickr I came across some beautiful examples of Letterpressed invitations by Bella Figura.
This led me on a search to find a UK based Letterpress company – it wasn’t long before I came across the wonderful Blush Publishing! The ever diligent and eternal night owl Mark Moran was extremely helpful and patient whilst I dithered about what design I wanted. Originally I had planned a funky square invite with motifs representing myself and Wayne. Wayne would be easy – an xbox controller (!) and maybe mine would have been a pair of scissors or a needle or a mouse? But as the wedding plans took shape and the vintage element really kicked in I just had to work this into the theme!
Quickly I decided on a 1950′s postcard style and used an example from the fantastic resource which is deviantART to use as my inspiration. I really wanted to incorporate my own artwork for this and knew deep down that computer graphics would look too stiff so I dusted off my sketchbook and got to work . .
Once the artwork was finished, I scanned it, tidied it up in Photoshop then turned it into paths for Illustrator where I could work on the text. I have always loved the look of old fashioned typewriter fonts, they remind me of my art school days when I used my old Olivetti to create many a bizarre text based piece! But I also love the trendy carnival style fonts you see a lot these days. Every waking minute I spent trying to get the look and the wording right – I even sent what I thought was the final proof off to be printed with several errors in my haste and bleary-eyed state!
But shortly after everything was finalised Mark and the clever bunch at Blush turned my design into the loveliness which is below. Even the cute wrapping added to the wonderful experience which is letterpress!”
by Sam
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