Besides Nathan’s super manly day, his trip to Iowa, and our camping trip, we’ve pretty much spent the Fall busy finishing up our Masters degrees. (Which we did finish! Yay!) So we were really excited when our photographer sent us the rest of our wedding photos, giving us a chance to think back on the day and procrastinate writing our theses. We’ll post some of the wedding photos later, but for now we wanted to share how we designed our own invitations.

One of the parts of the wedding that we wanted to keep personal and do ourselves was the invitations. We had already designed our own Save the Date postcards, which featured a silhouette of the two of us sitting under a huge tree. The silhouette was adapted from one of our favorite photos from a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains in 2009.

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For the invitations we wanted something pretty simple but still personal and adapted from our own photographs. After sifting through a bunch of invitations online, we decided to make a series of three different designs, one for each of our colors (blue, green, yellow). We decided to go with a national park theme, so we selected three photographs that we thought were distinctive and which would fit nicely at the bottom of a page.

Once the photos were selected, Nathan modified the images to be more like a graphic/sketch. First they were transferred to grayscale, then posterized, then further simplified so that only a few shades of color were needed.

Yosemite New Years 2011 – used for the RSVP card

We decided that the designs would be printed on pastel paper in blue, green, or yellow so we selected the colors of the design to be darker, but match the tone and hue of the paper.

Final touch was writing the text and selecting fonts!

Grand Tetons (where we got engaged) for the invitation

We used one design for the invitation, one for the RSVP card, and one for the Family Dinner invitation. We also used the same designs for the wedding day – as menus, place cards, and table numbers.

Grand Canyon for the Family Dinner Menu (Photo by Tom Alphin)

Table Numbers – Photos by Phoebe Joy

We doubt that many people knew that the designs were derived from our own photos, but we were just glad to remember a few of our favorite trips on our wedding day.