Tigera

The inspiration for the wedding stationary design - the cake topper!

Last year my partner and I finally took the plunge and married on the 08/08/08.   With my background in graphic design, I had designed wedding stationery before, however, I found designing my own stationery to be the most challenging project ever!  I was my own worst Bridezilla and I can’t count the number of design iterations that occurred before I finally settled on a design that I liked and could work with.

In essence, I  wanted a design that captured the date of the wedding and something  unusual and contemporary. My design also had to work for all elements of the wedding for overall design consistency.  My final inspiration came when I had found a contemporary sculpture of a couple that looked like the figure 8. Perfect!  I had to have it!

The wedding design used on the stationery

So I ordered the sculpture from Canada six months before the big day and started designing my invites and other stationary based on the concept of using the sculpture as my wedding cake topper.

I had selected blue and gold as our wedding colours and since the sculpture had not arrived, I began creating a vector graphic of the sculpture so I could reuse the design throughout my wedding stationary as a theme.

Considering the unusual shape of the sculpture, it took a few hours for me to get the shading, colours and shape to a state I was happy with.  Then I found the original colours had had selected looked washed out on the blue and gold paper we had selected for our stationary.  Back to the drawing board again to colour match and get the colours right!  Once the design passed the printing test, I then reused that design for the invitations, ceremony programmes and reception stationary.

Just after we had sent our invitations, we found that the original sculpture failed to arrive from Canada!  The supplier in Canada also could not re-send another sculpture because they had completely sold out.  Everyone told me weddings could be challenging and it seemed that everyone getting married on that date also had a similiar idea to myself!  I scoured the Internet on the hunt for another sculpture that could be posted to Australia.  Finally, I found a shop in London who had one remaining sculpture left.  Thankfully it arrived 2 weeks before the big day to be used as our cake topper!  In retrospect, even if it had not arrived it would not have been such a great disaster afterall!  Our guests were having such a great time, only a small number of them noticed the link between all the carefully crafted stationary and the cake topper!  The pictures below are some examples of the final design incorporated into the invites.

Wedding Invitation design. This was printed on gold coloured parchment paper with a blue backing.

We decided to use a wedding wishing well, so this little card was included in our invites.

The RSVP card was printed on different coloured paper with the invites to ensure it captured attention.