Electing Letterpress

So now that you’ve seen the fantastic “campaign logo” created us for by ABCD, can you guess what happened after that? As much as I love paper, and as much as Amy loves working with fresh, outside-the-wedding-box visions, we  couldn’t stop our collaboration at the logo. We asked ABCD to design our entire wedding stationery suite, and let me tell you… it was one of the best decisions we made in the entire wedding planning process.

By the time we brought ABCD on board, Trevor and I had already spent a couple of Saturday afternoons flipping through invitation books at stationery stores. Our basic reaction to most of what we saw? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. We needed color and art and whimsy in our invitations, and didn’t see it anywhere. We knew our invitations would set the tone for our wedding, and for a girl who used to spend her allowance on pretty paper, I wanted them to be amazing. We wanted our guests to look at their invitations and know that a mellow, tongue-in-cheek, bursting-with-love, FUN weekend on the Outer Banks awaited them. Design-wise, we needed to strike a fine balance. We wanted our campaign logo to be present, but not be overpowering. We wanted to play on the political theme a bit, but not be too gimmicky. We didn’t want traditional script or calligraphy, but we also didn’t want them to be too modern, either. We wanted a vintage and folk art flair, but also to somehow represent the beach. And we wanted letterpress, but we didn’t want to break the bank. A tall order, right? Amy took it all in stride. Here’s our fabulous stationery suite, as designed by ABCD:

ABCD Stationery Suite

The components of the suite played off each other throughout all of the pieces. We had folk art flowers, a swirl motif that hinted at ocean waves, an old-fashioned typeface along with cleaner fonts, and language that was playfully political. ABCD worked within our budget to find ways to maximize the bang for the buck. And oh, was there bang! The first thing guests saw was our love story, letterpressed on the belly band. Notice the Constitution joke… we couldn’t help ourselves!

Our love story on our belly band

Inside, a campaign sticker and a letterpress envelope liner:

Logo

Liner

Our invitation was the most traditional piece of the suite, using the swirls to invoke waves and white space to set off the letterpress. We included a Weekend Activity Card to make sure guests knew that they weren’t just being invited to a wedding, but instead to an entire weekend full of events, beginning with a Welcome Cookout the night before the wedding. The heading of the Weekend Activity Card was “Love at First Debate,” which gave a nod to the first night we met.

Invitation and Weekend Activity Card

Ahh... letterpress

One of my favorite pieces of the suite was our RSVP card. We had several guests “cast their vote” by phone and tell us they were doing so because they were keeping the card as a memento – it was too beautiful to give back! I think you can see why:

RSVP

RSVP up close and personal

These pieces saw us all the way through the wedding. ABCD also created programs and thank you cards for us, too. She even gave me the digital files so that I could use the same fonts and designs to create escort cards, table signs, and more for the wedding day myself. We still get compliments about our stationery suite, and I couldn’t be happier with the final products. While many brides preserve their wedding bouquets in a shadowbox, guess what’s going to be in mine? You got it: letterpress!

Next up: We had the dressed-up paper… so how’d we dress ourselves?