FMP: Inspiration - Wedding Magazine

Earlier on in my proposal I had a list of all of the magazines and websites I was going to take a look at, and the other day I purchased Wedding Magazine, which was at the top of my list. As I have never designed wedding stationary before I paid a lot of detail to the articles within this magazine because it was an Inspiration Special issue. It came with a few other smaller magazines and one of them held over 200+ inspiring ideas.

Mood Board 

I briefly flicked through the magazine and it’s counterpart and made marks on the page where I found something inspirational, and I took photos of these inspirational ideas and have collected them all into a mood board. 

All images belong to Wedding Magazine

As you can see, I didn’t just focus on wedding invitation designs but also wedding dresses, typography, and colour schemes. I really like the whole cream-peach-gold colour scheme as it would bring connotations of purity as well as elegance as white is a very “pure” colour in some countries.

The Articles

The Clothes

The magazine’s main focus was on the wedding dress and the clothes to wear to a wedding (so it was good for bridesmaids as well). For example, in “The Wedding List” it lists the clothing as the first things to note down before leading onto food and films to watch to get into the wedding mood. 

Within this list there was a little section on “Style Notes” which was all about wedding dresses and advice on what to wear them with such as the perfect heels. They had some key words such as “BFF” which stands for Back-up Frock Fix, for those brides who want more than one dress for different times of the day (as it’s hard to dance in your full-length gown!)

FMP: Screenshots - Idea 3 (Continued)

So afterwards I thought that the best way to decide whether or not to use it as a final piece was to experiment with it a bit more and see what the type would look like against it, so I brought the design up on InDesign.

The Front

I then added the type, and took away the "Once upon a time" bit. I created two new text boxes - one for the O and one for the nce upon a time - and placed everything where I wanted it to be.
When I tried using Dropcaps before I couldn't adjust the kerning, hence why I am doing everything separately. 
I used Ruritania as the typeface for the heading as it's the only one I have found that best resembles the type found on medieval scripts, and Minion Pro for the main text.

FMP: My Wording on Wedding Invitations

Wedding Invitation
Here are my versions of what I'm going to on the wedding invitation. I did this by looking at all of the invitations I had analysed in the previous post and taking a look at what I had gathered from that research.
However I first tried writing it out as a poem to enhance that fairy tale theme.

1)

This one was a bit messy because I kept changing my mind on what to write, but here's the final draft:

Once upon a time there was a woman called Sophie
A dreamer, an artist, but was a little lonely,
So she travelled far and wide to find the missing piece
Like Jason searching for the Golden Fleece,
And along came her prince charming, a man named Mark,
Who opened her eyes an created a spark,
The spark then grew into a thing called love
And then their hearts beat together like a fluttering of doves. 
And you, my dear, are cordially invited
To celebrate their wedding, aren't you excited?

Now I just need to think of how I'm going to lay out the rest of the details such as the time and place... Although I think I might do them in a separate section on the invitation so that it's not part of the poem.

FMP: Screenshots - Creating the Castle

I thought that I'd bring up my design from idea 3 (the castle idea) onto Illustrator so that I could start working on it, just to where it takes me. I'm still not too sure whether or not to use this idea as a final piece but it doesn't hurt to do some experimentation whilst I figure out a design.

I open up Illustrator and put in the dimensions of an A6 card because that would be the size I'm hoping my invitation to be, and then I Placed my sketch onto it and lowered the opacity. Creating a new layer I then used the Shape tool to start forming my castle (as it really is made out of squares, triangles and circles, if you think about it).
To tweak some of these shapes I used the white arrow to adjust the anchor points of each shape.

I created a new layer for each section of the castle as I have separated it into three parts; the front, the middle, and the tower section at the back.

FMP: Vintage Grimm: The Complete Fairy Tales

Translated, introduced and annotated by Jack Zipes

Even though I do know about fairy tales I wanted to look at the original versions of them. This is because I want to see if there was any moral of the stories we were read to as a child, and just how much Disney has changed the original versions to suit their target market (children).

The best way to look at original versions was to look at the tales written and collected by the Brothers Grimm, who were notorious for all of the fairy tales we know today. Some of them I knew were going to be a bit gruesome as they were written many years ago, during darker times (and in fact there were a lot of cannibals and horrible deaths in this book). 

This book has 279 stories within so I wasn’t able to read them all (although I did read quite a lot of them), and afterwards I picked out the “main” stories that we had actually heard of as a child. Such stories included Rumplestiltskin, Snow White, Rapunzel, Little Red Cap, The Frog Prince and Brier Rose (Sleeping Beauty). I wrote little notes for each of them so that I could see whether or not there were any similarities between each of these stories. 

FMP: Idea 3 (Continued)

As I mentioned in my last post I have decided to pick one of my ideas to develop it to lead it onto a final idea. Once I have this done I could then look at the other pieces that I mentioned I'd design in my proposal.

As I've mentioned in my little notes I want to make the castle more elaborate, because right now it's got a basic form and as this would be the main focal point (as well as my main typeface) then I want to make it look as good as it can be.

So I've created a mood board for some castle inspiration, starting by first looking again at Neuschwanstein castle as it happens to be the most beautiful castle I've ever seen and looks as if it has come right out of a fairy tale.

FMP: Wording on Wedding Invitations

While I was gathering inspiration and creating a mood board I realised that most had the parents of the daughter inviting someone to the daughter's wedding, and yet others had the couple actually inviting someone. After asking around I discovered the reasons for this; traditionally the parents of the daughter would write the invitation as they would be the ones funding it, but nowadays the couples can actually arrange everything themselves.

So will I go down the traditional route, or the "modern" route? As I'm a bit unsure as of yet I am going to dedicate this post to analysing the wording of invitations. I feel that the invitations I have analysed previously didn’t really show any similarities apart from displaying the parent of the daughter’s names and the couple’s names, and although I wrote the structure of each invitation I want to be completely sure I know what I'm doing. 

Analysing Designs

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Romantic-Bohemian-Wedding-Invitation/7477961

"Mr. And Mrs Stephen Daniel Organ request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter Robyn Lindsay Organ to Colin Arthur Forestal son of Dr. Eileen Marie Forestal and the late Dr. Lawrence Harold Forestal
Saturday, the ninth of June
Two thousand and twelve
At six o'clock ...."

Structure:

• Names of parents (daughter)
• Couple's names 
• Name of son's parents
• Date - written in full
• Time
• Location

Conclusion: This invitation has been written out very formally, which is perhaps something that would be seen in a royal wedding invitation. This could quite possibly work for my design as well if I want to aim for something really formal.

Woop woop! Business Cards Arrived

Yay my business cards arrived in the post! I ordered them from moo.com and I tell you, they have got a really good thing going on there.

What's amazing is that they'll allow you to upload your own design - which is what I did here - and it's printed on really good quality paper as well! The price is brilliant and they arrived around 3 days after I ordered it which was incredibly quick. 

FMP: Idea 3 (Development of Idea 1)

I was quite determined to continue with my idea of having a fairy tale castle, but for a while I was hitting a blank wall with it. That was until I was on my hour break at work that suddenly I was struck by inspiration.

I first started off with the idea of having the invitation displayed on three different layers; the first being the silhouette of the castle, the middle of the mountains, and the back of the writing. Each layer would be in a different coloured card so that it would be easier to separate them all. I would then bind these layers together so that they would fan outwards so they'll be able to stand.

I kept simplifying this idea because I wanted to see what direction it would take me, and I came to just having the invitation on one layer. This one layer then changed into the idea of the invitation being in the shape of the castle, with the lettering on it.

Conclusion:
I believe I have really taken the original idea into a completely new one by simply breaking it down into smaller pieces, as it were, to create a simple yet effective design. I really like the final outcome so I might continue to develop it into a final piece.

FMP: Ideas 2 & 3

I moved away from the castle idea to come across a new one (well, two new ideas); these were inspired by the story of Brier Rose, otherwise known as the Sleeping Beauty, so I did some rough sketches.
I thought it was best to think of the names for the future bride and groom, and so chose Mark and Sophie as they were pretty straightforward. I'll probably do the same technique where I picked names at random for the surnames as well!