Chandler & Smythe Wedding Invites
- Client
Victoria Chandler & James Smythe - Printing
Starshaped Press - Date
December 2008
Victoria and James are friends of ours who live in the UK. In planning their wedding, they searched the countryside for invite printers and came to one conclusion, they didn’t like a thing that they saw. That’s when they came to us. With an empty canvas and a little help from our friends at Starshaped Press we’d put together an invite package that would stand out quite a bit from the rest of the standard, cookie cutter invites littering their fine countryside. (Which, as I’m told, is quite important in the competitive world of garnering attendance to your British wedding, an event that begins almost a year before the actual date arrives, oh my!)
For the invite’s visuals we worked with a few concepts. First, the season. The wedding would be taking place right when summer would be turning to fall and mother nature would be working on its last hurrah of the season. The intent was to capture that moment when you walk outside and suddenly realize that the new season is upon you. Secondly, James being a writer, we wanted to incorporate words into the design as more than just vessels of information, but as imagery themselves. Various drafts of the invite’s text were worked into the background textures highlighting the text’s own organic change over time.
Finally, our original friendship arose from a mutual love of most things musical. As such, the decision was made early on to package the invite in one of Starshaped Press’ “tab-n-slot” CD packages. We replaced the CD with the invite, using the sleeve itself as the mailing envelope. This allowed us to easily continue the design of the invite to the outer package, creating a visual impact as soon as you open you mailbox.