Do It Yourself: Vintage Marriage Design

Vintage Wedding Emblem/Symbol, silhouettes kissing

Just Married!

Welcome to this blog where I’m planning to show my work and talk a little about how it came into being.

So, my wife Jenny and I just came back home to Sollefteå, Sweden from our honeymoon in Paris – and what better way to kick off this blog then to show you some design work from the wedding!

To begin with Jenny showed me a lot of pictures from the blog Green Wedding Shoes. Most of the stuff there looked pretty expensive and everything was being made by payed professionals – even entire design studios where involved: Photographers, Decorators, Paper and typography experts etc etc..  Well, we set out to do as much as possible ourselves and save our extra millions of cash for something else.

  • We started planning almost 6 months ago, it was January and Sollefteå was ice-cold! But we had a lucky start: Jenny’s father had a tuxedo with a gigantic hat that an old boss gave to him some 20 to 30 years ago. It fit me perfectly and we took our car, our camera (a Canon EOS 400D) a tripod and a remote control and we went out into the woods to try and take some photos for the invitations!

It was -15°C that day and we almost died, but some of those 100 or so shots came out OK!

Wedding Couple in the snow.

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For the official invitation picture we selected this one below with us kissing. I used Photoshop to do some color fixing. I  also painted on it with my Wacom tablet to hide my hand holding the remote control for the camera, and lastly I ran the “smart sharpen” algorithm on it.

Wedding couple in the snow, retouching photo with Photoshop example.

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Next I made some vector sillhouettes from that photo and searched for old paintings on Google to find a suitable vintage frame. In the background we went with candy-pink stripes and festive pennants that matched Jenny’s plans for the party location.

Vintage Wedding Invitation: Final version and printed

Vintage Wedding Invitation: Printed inside

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The wedding took place on Åland, in the archipelago where I grew up. I started to work on a hand drawn map of the area but I gave it up as guests arrived early and I wanted to spend time with them. Here are some of the places and things I drew:

Hand Drawn Map Symbols: Camping, love, champagne, church, store etc.

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We also made a program for the party with short descriptions of all guests. We used GoogleDocs to simultaneously work on the text from different computers. And whenever we came up with something funny to write, it was great to always have the latest version available. Lastly we included this photo of us that was a montage I made with PS:

Double Portrait Montage

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