You may already seen this on my portfolio page, but I thought I'd talk some more on the creation of this invitation on the blog. This was a massive undertaking, which may be hard to imagine if you just get the invitation all perfect and put together in the mail. And I want to do it justice, so I'll start from the beginning:
The first part of any massive project starts with pen and paper. We have a large desk in our office that we call the "collaboration station," and that's my favorite spot to get crafty. I had printed a massive collection of inspiration from the web, and had a couple of extra tools with me besides pen and paper. From that afternoon, I came up with three concepts. The first two had a final size of 5x7 inches and were slightly more traditional with a folded card, and a pocket inside for inserts. The third version, was larger, 6x9 inches, and all pieces were wrapped together with a band.
Next, I brought all those annotated paper versions I created to the graphic designer that works with me, Amber Mott. I asked her to create at least a couple of different "first page" ideas for the three concepts. We wanted the invitation main color to be white, with copper accents. Very simple and elegant, inspired by a different design that I knew the President liked.
With the design Amber created, we printed all pieces again, and cut and glued them together to take to the president. That part alone took about five hours to complete. You can see a couple of the finished mock ups below (and you can also see how well-calibrated our office printer is):
I met with the President to share the mock ups, and she decided to proceed with the 6x9 vellum and wrapper version. I added all the finalized copy to that version, and you bet I screen-shotted what my Illustrator looked like when I started putting this whole thing together!
It was a giant puzzle how everything came together at the time of stuffing envelopes, but basically, everyone in the six different mailing lists would receive all "white" cards (the pages at the top of the screen that are not copper), a wrapper, and one of each envelope (the two un-designed bottom rectangles). The copper sections would then include different messages and/or RSVP cards, and each would go to a different mailing list.
This was an amazing project to be part of, and I am so thankful for the team I work with (Amber Mott and Autumn Thatcher, writer and editor) because we are able to make amazing things like this on a daily basis.
Check out my portfolio for more information on this project.