My fiancé and I tied the knot in Vegas over the weekend and I thought I’d share my design process for our Save the Date announcements. I don’t get the chance to do many self-initiated projects, but needless to say I took great interest in doing this one. Although it presented numerous challenges along the way, It was so refreshing to step away from the computer and design this project with my hands.

Update:

Watch for this Save the Date in the upcoming book “1000 More Greetings” by Rockport Publishing hitting the book stores everywhere Fall 2010.

To start off I took the above two photos and composited them together in Photoshop. The photo of us was taken with my Canon 40D being remotely triggered using OnOne Software’s DLSR Remote iPhone App, I simply held my iPhone in hand and fired off a few shots. I wasn’t really that concerned with focus & exposure because I planned on tweaking the colors and blurring us out in the end anyways.

The photo of us was taken with my Canon 40D being remotely triggered by OnOne Software’s DLSR Remote iPhone App…

Here’s what the final composited image looks like — cloning, blurring and color balance was used to achieve the final effect. I did all the prints at home using my Epson R2880 Printer, I originally wanted to use Premium Presentation Epson Paper because of the nice dull / uncoated finish it has but I found that when they were stitched to the chipboard (see below), the prints were being indented & scratched so I ended up using Premium Luster Epson Paper instead — that seemed to hide any scratches and indentations that the prints were receiving from the sewing machine.I purchased some duplex chipboard (around 1/16th”) from a local art supply store and had them cut to a 5.5″ square before having them printed. I tried rubber stamping first to be more cost-effective but found that the chipboard tends to bleed if you try to stamp them, so that wasn’t going to work. After figuring out that screen-printing was my only option I headed over to HB Products to get these puppies printed — Jorge, Bob & Angel hooked it up for me. I sat with Angel and helped him dry each pass by hand, usually you would run it through these huge dryers that they use for t-shirts but the intense heat just ended up warping the chipboard so I had to use this crazy hot industrial blow dryer to cure each pass instead

Angel was stoked. Nice job buddy — hope you enjoyed your Cerveza!

Next I sourced a local alteration shop to sew the photos onto the chipboard — they were reluctant about doing the job until they saw how easy it was for their needles to pierce through it. They ended up using a heavy-duty leather sewing machine because of concerns about the internal stress it may or may have not put on one of their regular machines.

Although it presented numerous challenges along the way, It was so refreshing to walk away from the computer and design this project with my hands.

The photo sewn on the front created a nice frame for the details & logo that was screen-printed on the back. Being that we had a Vegas theme I thought using Roulette style numbers for the date was appropriate. All type was set in Clarendon.

The sides were set off by painting them red with a Sharpee Poster Paint Pen to add that last little touch. I Hope you enjoyed this peek into my design process for these, I’ll be posting up our favor / gift box design process shortly too. Stay tuned…..