Mint

Most of the couples I work with on invitations are out of state, but I love when I get to work with locals! Colleen and Doug live in my area, but are getting married on Bald Head Island, which is a beautiful spot off the coast of North Carolina, only reachable by boat. Once you’re on the island, the only transportation is your bike, a golf cart, or good old-fashioned walking. It’s a beautiful vacation spot, or a great day trip if you’re lucky to live close enough.

Colleen & Doug wanted something simple and modern, but with traditional elements and illustrations to reflect their wedding destination. There is only one chapel on the island, and I made an illustration of it for their main invitation. I made an illustration of the Bald Head Island light house for the label on the outside of the vellum wrap, and then we used a hawaiian shirt for the luau-themed rehearsal dinner and an orchid illustration—orchids are their wedding flower—for the morning-after brunch and the address label on the rsvp envelope. They were printed on a soft white paper with a charcoal grey liner for the outer envelope and a matching grey envelope for the rsvp. Like my own invitations, Colleen and Doug decided to use a vellum wrap instead of an inner envelope.

This inspiration board isn’t what Colleen and Doug are planning, but it’s what I imagine their wedding could be like!

image credits: [1] oyster photo by michele waite via 100lc [2 and 3] hello tenfold [4] by simply bloom via once wed [5] by ashley garmon [6] bald head island [7] studio foto via smp

These will be added to hello tenfold next week!

As I read through each of your comments about my “news,” I was overwhelmed by your kindness and by how insanely talented you guys are! Some of you are frequent commenters, and I know your beautiful blogs & work well. Others are new to me. I’m just showing one photo each from a few different commenters, but please follow the links in this post to see tons more talent, and click through the comment links on my last post, too. So much to be inspired by! Above is work by Ivana of Love Ardently.

This is an invitation from Libby Cole, who must be a Durhamite like me! Libby has done work for Duke and a new local restaurant, Dos Perros.

Jennifer Mao is an all-around talented woman from Seattle. This photograph, from her series “With or Without You” makes me smile.

Kate Miss is a designer working in NYC who does branding, books, illustration, packaging, photography, websites, and more.

This beautiful invitation was designed by Kate Arends from Minneapolis.

Great mix & match stationery from Avie.

Beautifully designed & printed invitations by Jonna Isaac.

and many more… go check each other out.

Thank you so much for all of your support! Your emails and comments have been so encouraging and helpful for me the past few days. I’m uplugging for a bit but I’m excited about returning to Mint on Tueday.

After making so many inspiration boards for our wedding (many of which I couldn’t share here because I did such a bad job remembering where I found the photos!), I thought I might as well make a couple out of our own wedding photos. I’m not quite sure why I wanted to do this, other than it was really kind of fun. And since inspiration boards were where the wedding planning all started, it seemed fitting that that’s how I should end it, too.

It is a little bittersweet to be done with our wedding planning. Despite all the tears (oh yes, there were tears) it was a lot of fun and was the biggest project we’ve pulled off yet!

As soon as I finish writing it, I’m going to have a “wedding graduate” post for A Practical Wedding. If there were two things that were most important about our wedding planning, it was that we only spent time and money on things we enjoyed, and practicality was a major priority. I’ll leave it at that for now, and I’ll let you know when my “two cents” are up on APW.

Have a great weekend!

[photos all taken by either harry taylor, amy jones, or myself]

Wedding quick links:

• Save the dates

• Invitations

• Rehearsal dinner invitations

• Bridal shower invitations

• Programs & direction cards

• Guest book

• Pew Cards (and here)

• Birdseed bags (with template)

• Flowers

• Dress, jewelry & veil

• Getting organized (with download)

• Paper & printing

• Tearing paper & gocco tips

• Our photographer

• All wedding posts

a few recent favorites, from a few favorite blogs:

via apartment therapy

photo by lara rossignol via sfgirlbybay

photo by kerstin reilemann, via decor8

photo by wai lin tse via design sponge

photo from Marie Claire Maison via the Style Files

photo by wai lin tse

via luphia loves

photo by mark lund via mustard and sage

I’ll be getting more wedding inspiration and ideas right up until the day of, I know it. Yesterday I caught up on what seemed like 200 posts I’ve missed from Style Me Pretty, and I loved these double silhouettes (maybe a last minute addition for our rehearsal dinner invites?) and this veil shot by A Bryan Photo, which I kind of want to stage because my veil is the best. The Best. Oh I am excited.

I’m taking tomorrow off from blogging, and heading back to my hometown to work on wedding stuff. I’ll be bringing this collage along with me to share my ideas with our vendors – some of whom are friends of my family (lucky us!).

Our reception location is sort of open-air (although covered) and on the beach, so I like the idea of laid back, organic floral arrangements. I also want to bring in some patterns (maybe in the wedding programs) and since there is a long wooden walkway down to the beach I’d love to set up luminaries. Although I originally wanted to do many normal-sized cakes on cake stands instead of a big wedding cake, the size of our wedding and expense of all those cake stands started to add up. Instead, we’re going to have a simple cake like the one above.

Both the bridesmaids and groomsmen will wear gray, with light blue or pale aqua ties for the guys (we’ve found some great deals on suits at Target). The flower girls will wear a pale aqua too, and the ring bearers will be in khaki pants, white shirts, and blue ties – simple and easy. And I hope some of the ladies will be in yellow shoes!

[Unfortunately I've lost track of the source for the top left photo (any help here would be appreciated!) The bouquet and table are from Mary Beth and Otis' beautiful wedding, via Snippet and Ink, and photographed by Studio Nouveau. I found the cake on The Knot, and the photograph is by Union Photography. The save the date is our own, the gray dress and yellow shoes are J.Crew, and the aqua earrings and dress are from Anthropologie. (I altered the color of the dress in photoshop to fit my color scheme). The suit is from Banana Republic, the hair flower is from Muscari, and the luminaries were photographed by Betty Schlueter.]

Last week at work, we had a meeting to share the images that are currently inspiring our work. This time we were focusing on typography. The goal in these meetings is to stretch ourselves and each other creatively – and of course, it’s always fun to see what other people find. I keep an Inspiration folder on my desktop, so I grabbed a few of those images and printed them out. I also grabbed the latest issue of Communications Arts (Design Annual 49) and flagged some things in there.

The top spread and the image above (a close-up of the same spread) feature Chen Design Associates. Chen is one of my favorites when I’m looking for inspiration because their print work is really cool. Their clients aren’t pinching pennies when it comes to high end printing techniques, and I love the closeups of deep indentations and metallic inks…. yum.

This is a print out of some things in my desktop folder. They are designs by Designwerkhaus and Pentagram.

I love this one by Mono for the combination of vintage materials overlaid with large type. Always a winner in my book! It’s interesting conceptually too, because the project was for the Science Channel and encourages people to “question even previously accepted principles.” Screen printing on vintage textbooks is a cool way to send that message. Here’s an image pulled from their website since I like the project so much:

I liked the above image (Soapbox Design) for the gutsy way they broke up the titles “Yahoo” and “Fatal Blow,” along with handmade looking illustration. It’s often hard to present typographic ideas like this to our more conservative clients, but this image makes me remember that the client will never go for it if you don’t even try!

This last one is one of Brendan’s inspirations. We’ve been thinking about large scale typography as an art form and this was good for brainstorming. Via Print Magazine Regional Design Annual ‘08, project by Gluekit.

See larger versions of these photos on Mint’s Flickr account!