I hope it’s not too vain of me to include my own wedding stationery in this portfolio, but I did so because I was happy with the way I met all three of our overall wedding planning goals with this design:

1. Give our guests a memorable, pleasant experience.
2. Minimize the stress and frustration for us.
3. Avoid having tons of decorations and knickknacks left over afterward.

To reduce cost, environmental impact, and pre-wedding rage, I minimized the form of the invitations to just two printed pieces and two envelopes, no ribbons or glitter or belly bands in sight. Instead, I used the aquarium theme for decoration, much as I used the inherent qualities of the actual venue to avoid making piles of ribbon bows or buying floral arrangements. Suppressing my inner font addict, I kept myself to two contrasting accent fonts and a bold serif body font to maximize readability for my parents’ guests, most of whom do not read English as their first language.

I carried the same fonts and colors into the program. We had planned for several traditional wedding events, such as the cake-cutting and baby alligator encounter (everyone has one of those, right?), to take place at different sites throughout the aquarium to encourage our guests to explore the entire venue. I therefore needed to get a map into the hands of all the guests, but I didn’t want to generate another piece of paper for everyone to lose. My solution was to incorporate the map into our program and indicate where and when special events would take place. (The aquarium-provided map quite serendipitously coordinated with our theme colors.)