First of all I’d like to point out that today marks the 3 month mark until our big day! Now if you follow us on Instagram, read the blog, or have just been around us the past few weeks you know that we’ve been slaving over our formal wedding invitations. Now that they’ve officially been sent out and are in the hands of our loved ones, we can finally share them with you! We’re going to Tarantino it a bit and show you the end result, followed by how we got there.

They’re a bit interactive, which we just love. As you can see each page includes one element of the San Antonio skyline along with additional information about our wedding. So how did we get here?

We originally knew that we didn’t want a bunch of weird loose pages of different sizes that people would lose, but because we’re having a “destination” wedding we knew there was a lot of information to include, so we knew we wanted some form of tabbed booklet. We also knew that we wanted to incorporate our six colors therefore having each tab (or page) highlighting a different color. We originally had it as a square with a logo Derek designed using our initials. Enter phase I:

After doing some quick research at the post office though, we realized that having a square envelope is what causes postage to be higher so we decided to use an A7 envelope instead causing our invitations to be 5″x7″. We’ve always believed that you should never go with your first design, so we kept brainstorming. I played around with some other designs while channeling my inner Jonathan Adler, but nothing really felt like “the one”.

The first version felt more like Derek and the second version felt more like me, and we really wanted it to be a blend of both of us. So we thought about our family who will be traveling in, and the modern feel of the day, and what’s important to us and decided to incorporate our city. This city is really what brought us together (more about that here) so it really felt like the perfect homage to our love story. I have always loved Derek’s line drawings (you can see some framed here from our recent bathroom revamping) so I instantly knew that I wanted him to do some simple line drawings of the San Antonio skyline.

While he worked on the perfect perspective for each building, I started laying out the text and information we wanted to include. I used this simple line drawing of Chicago as a place holder so that I knew how much room I had for text.

After several sketches and tweaking we finally settled on the perfect San Antonio skyline that worked for our format, and scanned it into be placed on the invitations I had been working on.

Once the new skyline was added to our actual inviations things started coming together. The biggest struggle I had was designing the map. I’m sure it may sound a little silly going to all of this trouble over a map considering everyone probably has smart phones, but the traditionalist in me wanted our guests to have a physical map just in case.

I started out just focusing on the area of our venues, but quickly realized it was only really helpful for those who are staying downtown:

Who knew maps were so complicated? Once we had all of the text exactly as we wanted it we started playing with the order of each page, which helped us decide which building would be paired with each page, and came up with this:

We placed our order with our print shop and about a week later five boxes full of invitations arrived, ready to be hand cut!

Yes. We hand cut out each and every building with the help of my lovely bridesmaid Lauren, and my Dad.

80 invites x 5 pages = lots of blisters

My dad even got a little OCD with all of his scraps. See where I get it from??

Once each and every last invitation was cut out and assembled I went ahead and pre-stamped all of our RSVPs, that way no one could have an excuse as to why they didn’t send theirs in ;) I chose these cherry blossom stamps because I thought they were cute and they had a lot of our wedding colors already.

Once everything was ready to go, it was time to stuff the envelopes and send them on their way! Oh wait.. you know I didn’t just have boring plain envelopes! Well this post is long enough, so I’ll share the envelope details with you tomorrow. Stay tuned!