I am extremely pleased with my designs, even more so that I have managed to create a stationary set rather than just a wedding invitation. It had been my first time in dabbling in stationary design and I have to say that I really enjoyed it and would love to do it again.
The fact that I’ve hidden little aspects of fairy tale stories within my illustration that is repeated across all of my designs means that I have met the requirements of my brief, which was to create an invitation for a fairy tale wedding. I had used traditional techniques because I felt that it was one of my strong points in design, and I am so glad that I had done this (especially because I wasn’t happy with my previous designs!)
It may seem strange that I had used black in my designs, but that’s because I wanted to create a design that would fit into one of the current trends in wedding stationary - Monotone. By using pink only brings the illustration to life and enhances the romantic appearance of the design, therefore linking to the love that the couple share.
I am very pleased with my typeface choices as well, as I fell in love with Lavanderia as soon as I clapped my eyes on it. It is actually the first typeface I’ve used in a university project where I could only use it for personal use, so whenever I posted my design online I will say how it’s for a personal project in order to avoid any problems in future with the type designer.
Junicode works really well with Lavanderia because it is quite simple in comparison, and it wasn’t too overpowered by its serifs, as they were relatively thin.
However I feel that by using black for the back of my other designs does probably make it look too dark. The reason I used black in the first place was so that all of my designs linked in, and as I used black card to insert in between my invitation then I thought it would be best to carry on this feature throughout my other designs. The audience could misread the use of black as one of the dominant colours, and so I hope that by using hints of pink and a lot of white space then this’ll dampen the “dark” connotations that crop up.
The reasons listed above is the reason why I have changed my mind and quickly printed out another series of designs, and this time I didn't mount them up onto black card (although left the invitation with the black card inserted in between the two sheets, as it were). The black card backing just didn't seem right to me, and even though it might look quite plain these designs are now more suited for a wedding.
I had some problems deciding whether or not I should draw a line for the couple to write out the guest’s name, but after much deliberation I decided to leave it as it seems more personal and less mass-produced if I left this feature out. Besides, most of the invitations I had looked at didn’t include this line possibly for the same reasons as mine.
I also couldn’t figure out whether it would be more appropriate to write “names” on the RSVP card instead of the “M”, as when I showed it to several of my classmates they didn’t know what the M was for. I went with the “M” in the end as it was very rare to write “names” and I hardly ever saw it being used on the RSVP cards I had looked at. To help my lecturers know what the M is for I shall write on the names of a made up guest and then provide a blank version.
Printing & Assembling Designs
This happens to be the first project where the printing process went extremely smoothly as I was more experienced in using the printers at university, and I had also tried out by printing off at Staples. The result was perfect; the black was pristine and the type didn’t sink into the matte paper. Even the illustration came out very clean and there were no pixilation issues.
I did have problems with assembling my designs, especially where I wanted to put the black card inside of the invitation. My spray mount wouldn’t work so I had to resort to using double-sided tape that worked surprisingly well. Too well, in fact, because when I stuck my black card inside my invitations wrong I wasn’t able to correct it so I had to cover it by inserting another black card atop of that.
The Overall Process
After having some experiences in the past where I was rushing at the last minute I made sure that I did as much as I could right at the beginning of the project, and so all of my energy was focused during the first stages of my project. This enabled me to be able to do relevant research and even though I did go around in circles and had to redo my designs, I had plenty of time to experiment because of the fact I was doing so much work at the beginning rather than spreading it out.
My research went along quite well and I was more open to getting ideas rather than just sticking with Behance, and soon found stationary designers through wedding magazines. Even though these magazines mainly focus on clothing and the bride I was able to figure out the current trends and this helped me with my design. And, like I mentioned before, these magazines often featured some stationary designs so I was able to research into the actual designers a bit more. My favourite has to be Coral Pheasant, and she was my inspiration throughout the project.
I did waste a lot of time debating on what kind of direction I wanted to go in; for ages I went for the more digitalised look (so minimalist vectors) and kept on experimenting with different ideas even though I didn’t like any of them. Luckily I was able to talk to my lecturers about this to get me onto the right track, because if I hadn’t then I would’ve ended up hating the project and all of my designs.
I just wish I thought of using traditional media sooner! The thought was there at the beginning, but I just wanted to try something completely different that I didn’t realise I would end up not liking it. I think next time I won’t be so stubborn and perhaps try both digital and traditional media to see which one looks best.
I didn’t experiment with media as such – and would’ve loved to try out gold foil and creating wax seals – but there were several difficulties in learning these methods, and so I thought of abandoning the wax seal and replace the gold foil with experimenting on outlining with gold pen.
I focused most on my experimentation on idea generation, and this was something completely new because I had never been able to develop my ideas as much as I did for this project. This means that I spent more time on getting the ideas and sketching so that the designing process was much shorter (as I knew exactly what I was doing).
Overall Conclusion:
All in all, I really enjoyed this project despite the difficulties I had at the beginning and would love to delve further into stationary design, so maybe over the summer I shall look into it a bit more.
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