I have two fantastic friends who, after quite a long time of being engaged decided to finally tie the knot this year on November 27th. As part of their celebrations, they asked me to design their wedding invitations. You can see the final invitation here.

There were a few key requirements for the invite. Firstly, what it must contain. This included some way to RSVP, an invite to the wedding itself, an invite to the evening reception and a poem chosen by the couple.

As the budget was very small, the invite needed to be small enough that it would fit on A4 so they could be printed without any trouble. However, they also liked the idea of using a square format with a gate-fold and with this in mind, I came up with the idea of using a four piece suite of invitations all housed by one larger container.

There were also some requirements as to what the invitations must look like. It needed to have a baby blue theme, must have swirls and must somehow incorporate a butterfly or butterflies. The bride gave me a very simple example of a graphic she had found online as reference. This was the only thing I had to go on but I was confident that I could deliver something that the couple were happy with.

Although not a requirement, I felt that it’d be nice if the invitation had some sort of logo and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to incorporate the couple’s initials – C&D – into it. My first port of call was of course plenty of sketching.

One of many pages of sketches.

After a number of sketches, I finally came up with a potential way of how to use a C and a D to form a butterfly. It certainly wasn’t going to be as easy as I first thought, however. Currently, it didn’t look anything like a butterfly. More like a strange insect with very large antennae.

The initial concept.

After experimenting further on paper, I felt that I would be better scanning in the above logo and creating it in Illustrator.

Scanned and cleaned up.

I started to tweak the initial sketch, working on just one side of the illustration and then mirroring it to create a perfectly symmetrical graphic. The problem was that the tail of the ampersand was getting in the way and in the end, I felt that it worked better without it. I also shortened the antennae and tried to harden the outside corners of the two characters. Eventually, I ended up with this:

The first draft of the logo.

I wasn’t happy with what I had come up with by a long shot and I didn’t feel that this was elegant enough to warrant a place on a wedding invitation. It needed to be softer, more rounded and much more butterfly-like!

This is where many iterations began. My aim was to make the characters look more like wings but retain enough legibility that the characters weren’t lost altogether. I also sought advice on how to refine it to a point where I was happy with it.

The many evolutions of the logo.

It took a while but I eventually got to where I wanted to be.

The final C&D logo.

I felt that this logo worked the best because although other iterations looked more like a butterfly, I felt that this one looked like a butterfly and C&D equally.

Once the logo was finished, it was time to work on the invitations themselves.

As mentioned, one of the requirements of the invitation was that it must contain swirls of some sort. With this in mind, I went on a hunt for some interesting flourishes to take reference from and ended up finding an excellent collection of swirls from All Silhouettes.

A great selection of swirls to choose from.

A handful of swirls chosen from the collection.

And then the painstaking process began of duplicating and placing all of these swirls over the whole of the page to create a unique pattern and one which had as little repetition as possible. This meant placing each of the swirls individually, rather than copying and pasting whole chunks. It took quite a whole to cover the entire page, but eventually, it was completed.

The whole invitation laid out.

The first draft of the front of the invitation.

Above is the entire invitation laid out and a crop of just the front of it. I wanted there to be something special on the front as there wouldn’t be able to be anything central on the back due to the way the invitation opened. By using two of the swirls I had already chosen and enlarging them, I was able to form a heart and in it, place the first draft of the logo. I stuck with this idea for quite some time. However, after a while, it felt as if there was something not quite right about it. I felt that although the heart was a good idea, it wasn’t allowing the main element – the logo – to breathe enough and so eventually, the idea was scrapped and I came up with something much lighter. Something with more room to breathe.

The final design.

The new front of the invitation.

Instead of the heart taking up too much space around the logo, I reduced it right down and instead, used it to house the date of the wedding. I also tweaked the colours so they felt a little more vibrant instead of rainy day and I felt that things were now coming together enough to then move onto the four-piece suite that would be housed within the container.

For each of the pieces of the invitation, the couple had already given me the text including a poem. However, some of the words didn’t quite match the tone of voice of the invitation and I suggested a change, which worked much better both visually and logically when reading. The new text was able to be bigger and a little more spaced out. Some of the invite has been omitted for privacy in these shots.

The main invitation, using the original text.

The reworded invitation.

From here, the rest was plain sailing and all came together really well. The last thing to think about was what the invitation could actually be posted in. Luckily, there’s a fantastic site called Square Envelopes which has a fantastic range of, well, square envelopes! Their range happened to include the exact size I needed put one of the invitations.

The finished invite, peeking out from a perfectly sized envelope.

Upon showing Claire and Dave the invitations, they loved them. I feel really lucky and pleased to have helped in some small way to making their wedding a success.

I wish them the best of luck for life.

Producing an entire exhibition is certainly a different experience than simply creating a one-off piece of design. Producing an exhibition means taking everything into account and being responsible for it all fitting together and I have to admit that there were times when it didn’t seem like it was going to be done on time.

It all started at the beginning of March, when the class were told about the exhibition and the need to form a design committee to help organise and produce the show. A group of seven students originally volunteered to help steer the production in the right direction. Over the course of the next few months, we’d slowly begin to develop the show. To help with this, I set up a Facebook group and liaised with the tutors to send out an email to everyone asking everyone to join it so I could keep the class up to date with developments.

Facebook group for the exhibition

We invited the whole class to begin coming up with themes for the show. Something that the design committee could work with to develop invitations, posters and anything else that was needed. We gave people two weeks to develop their ideas into A3 boards and then discuss them with the rest of the class. This proved to be incredibly successful and from this, the idea of using exaggerated facts and figures was chosen.

The committee begin coming up with a range of facts that could relate to design students and their three years at University. This included ideas, hangovers, swearing, paper pads and computer crashes. These facts were then given large figures, based on one person’s experiences, multiplied by 60 (the number of people on the course). So where the average person may have 20 coffees a week, 60 people will have nearly 200,000 over the course of three years. What was clear after coming up with these facts and figures was that there was one fact that would always remain at 1 – the design show itself. This realisation helped to steer the project into the interesting direction of thinking about the exhibition as a culmination of three years. A filtering of ideas, good times, bad times and arriving at one design show, hence why the show was given the name “One Design Show”.

The idea of the past three years being filtered into one show made me think of how it had been tapered to a point – the point being the show – and this gave me the idea of making the invitation a triangle. Something that had a (literal) point to it. Using a triangle for an invitation would give added impact when sending out to design agencies and colleges because how often does someone recieve a triangle-shaped piece of mail?

One of my tutors had mentioned in passing that the previous year’s students had managed to make the invitation its own envelope and this was something that I also wanted to do to so I began to experiment with triangles and how they could fold up into an envelope to keep it secure.

An initial idea for the invitation for One Design Show

The first idea consisted of a hexagon, with a cut from the centre to the edge. The invitation would then fold up into a concertina, leaving a triangle shape. The problem was that in order for this to work, there needed to be enough copy/image to fill 12 pages (six triangles on one side, six on the other) and this proved to be too much and not necessary. This design also meant that a separate envelope was needed. Additionally, because there was a lack of bleed area between the triangles, it meant that some of the artwork was bleeding into another triangle. In short, the idea failed, but the concept was there.

Sticking with the triangle idea but simplifying it, I decided to try it with three panels next to each other instead. This was much easier to handle and it meant that by adding a tab at the end of the triangles, I could fold the whole thing up and the tab would secure it in place, thereby forming its own envelope. I went with this shape and started on the design work.

The numbers for each of the facts were quite big. I wanted some way of trying to relate these big numbers back to a digital medium and the obvious choice was pixels because that’s what any piece of artwork is made up from at some point or another before being printed. I have always enjoyed the work of people like eBoy and their method of using pixelation as an art form. I wanted to take this and try and make it work on a larger, invitation and poster-sized scale. For this reason, I decided that iconography would be great to use.

The original set of icons and one blown up.

I love working with iconography. It forces you to be economical with your design because you only have a 16x16px area to work with. Communicating a computer crash or a hangover in such a small space is quite an interesting project on its own but I had to make the icons work at print resolution. When a 16x16px image is printed at 300dpi, it is less than 3mm in width. This meant that the icon would need to be blown up if it was to be seen. However, by blowing something up so small to such big sizes, it was inevitable that they would look blurry and messy. Photoshop’s default method of resizing images is “Bicubic”, which is useful for things like photos. However, Photoshop also has another resize method called “Nearest Neighbour”, which allows pixels to stay sharp at larger sizes even when resized to ten times its original size.

The icons that I designed, although nice lacked colour and so a few of them were eventually redesigned including a red coffee mug instead of a white coffee cup and a few of these icons were using on the invitation that can you see on the project page.

Once the invitations were designed, it was then a case of finding a quote from the printers. The design department didn’t have a large budget to spend on promoting the show and tasked me with finding a suitable printers to print 400 copies of the invitation. Luckily, the invitation was small enough that two would fit on one A3 page, which meant that it immediately cut the costs in half. Unfortunately, due to the unusual shape of the invitation, they could not offer diecutting for price inside the department’s budget and this meant that I, along with a few other people were tasked with cutting them manually.

400 invitiations manually cut and ready to be sent.

After the invitations were taken care of, the next thing was Moo Minicards. At an early stage of producing the show, I had remembered a great website called Moo. They offer business card-like cards, slightly smaller called Moo MiniCards. I thought these would be a great addition to the show, allowing someone to take something away from it and keep a piece of student’s work with them. My idea was to put a piece of student’s artwork on a total of 100 cards and order 5 packs of them. Each pack costs just £10 so it was well worth it. I requested that all students send me three pieces of their work with their full name and website address. These cards were then scattered all over the tables between each student’s portfolio, making the tables come alive with colour and inviting people to pick them up and look more closely at the work.

Moo MiniCards scattered all over the tables.

The next thing to design were the posters which would help direct people to place in which the exhibition was being held. Originally, the idea was to produce 5 x A1 posters that would be easily visible around the campus. However, after walking around the campus and figuring out where the posters would go, it was clear that more than 5 would be needed. The budget didn’t allow for this. Instead, the posters were designed at A3, which meant that more could be produced and a fraction of the cost of 5 x A1 poster. A series of 8 posters were designed and printed twice, giving me 16 posters to place around the campus in preparation for the opening night.

So as to identify each piece of work on display, nametags for each exhibition stand were designed in the same style as the invitation and placed above each stand. Although a very simple part of the whole production process, these triangles, like the invitations had to be manually cut out of card.

The exhibition, ready for opening night.

Finally, a simple website was designed by myself and built by Liam Gallagher, another student on the course, that housed a few student’s work, descriptions of it and information on the show itself including when it was open and how to get there.

A few of the students who exhibited and/or helped with the show.

Overall, producing the University of Chester’s graphic design show was a really good experience. Liaising with so many people about so many different aspects of the show proved to be very difficult at times due to other coursework-related committments, but I believe that the end result was executed well. In particular, I was really happy with the quality and popularity of the Moo MiniCards that I had designed. As mentioned, I had a total of 500 cards printed and by the end of the seven day opening period of the exhibition, there were less than 100 left. Also, I was pleased to overhear some of the public who attended the opening night of the exhibition express their approval of the posters I had designed. It’s always nice to hear that something you’ve designed has been met with praise.

I’ve really enjoyed working on such a large scale project and I hope that I can do so again in the future.