Wedding Design?

Late last year, as I was nearing the end of my pregnancy, I was asked if I'd be interested in helping to plan/design a wedding. I'm not a wedding planner, but I am a designer who easily gets inspired by a new scope for a project ... so of course I said YES! I've been working with the bride and her parents for the past several months, fine-tuning concepts, developing designs, fabricating mock-ups, and most recently meeting with florists. We are still in the midst of finalizing the fine details for the ceremony and dinner (which will both be held at The Walker Art Center) ... but the invitations are done and have been mailed out - and I've been dying to share them!

So, neither the bride or groom are from Minnesota originally, but they moved to the Midwest to pursue their PHDs from the U of MN and have fallen in love with Minneapolis. The bride's parents just officially became Minnesota residents as well (moving from Washington DC to Duluth, MN) and so the majority of the guests will be coming from out of state for the wedding.

The concept for the invitations was to have a sculptural paper element wrap and enclose the flat written portions of the invitation. When the outer piece was unwrapped, I wanted it to be able to stand on its own and be a beautiful teaser before the wedding and a visual reminder of their weekend after they return home from the wedding. Given that most of their guests will have never been to Minneapolis, it only seemed appropriate to have the city greet them when they opened the invitation ... and be the sculptural paper element that wrapped the invitation.

We decided to use stock paper from PAPER SOURCE for all elements of the invitations using a mixture of Lux White that has a bit of texture and Lux Silver that has a bit of shimmer. The invite and response cards & overall envelope in white, the city-wrap and response envelope in silver. {side note: it was only after these had been finalized that I heard Jeremy Messersmith coining Minneapolis as the Silver City. How appropriate!} All printed text was done in black ink. I etched the bride & groom's names on the front flap of the city-wrap (and included the .silvercocoon. copyright on the back side where the Walker Art Center is revealed.)

During our first discussions I assumed we would have someone print the invitations for us, but in the end I produced the invitation cards, response cards and the city-wrap and we had only the envelopes printed by a printer. I even designed a little "logo" for their wedding {as seen on the response card} that might transfer to other elements {like thank you cards etc.} I thrive on finding a good process and developing a system for producing multiples of the same item, so I was well suited for making 130 invitations! And even better ... they've been received well.