I had the opportunity to design digital invites for an Indian wedding and accompanying festivities. Traditionally in Indian families, the bride/groom and their respective family visits each wedding guest and personally delivers a beautifully designed wedding invitation.
Due to pandemic regulations, the bride required something that could be easily sent over Whatsapp, to her few close wedding guests. She gave me full creative freedom, with one request: that a peacock be incorporated into the design as it is the couple's good luck charm.
I decided to go for a layout that is classy and modern, while still bearing some ornate design that is typical of traditional Indian wedding invites. Each invite was designed as part of a similar theme to form part of a set.
Each invite bears similar layout but different colours so that guests receiving multiple invites in their Whatsapp chat can easily navigate through a familiar layout of information but will be able to easily and quickly distinguish which invite is for which ceremony without mixing up dates and times.
The colours used were inspired by colours related to the rituals. The Henna night invite uses a green colour that is reminiscent of a henna leaf and the red resembles the colour that henna paste oxidises to when applied on the hand.
The Pithi ceremony is where the bride's family covers the bride in a tumeric mixture which is thought to bless her, purifies her body and helps brighten the skin before her big day. This ceremony is also done separately on the groom's side. The colours here represent the brightness of tumeric.
"Grah" means house and "shanti" means peace, thus this ceremony is performed to bring peace to the home of the bride and groom respectively. There is no specific iconic colour used in this ceremony but I chose to use blue and green as grounding and earthy colours to signify peacefulness as the ceremony includes elements of astrology too. These colours also related back nicely to the peacock look.
The wedding invite uses a slightly different layout to distinguish itself from the others as the main event. It uses a purple and blue colour scheme as this was the colour scheme of the decor at the wedding and also fully captures the peacock feather look.
The bride also wanted to request her guests to not gift her boxed gifts, so I came up with a short poem to capture this sentiment in a polite, light-hearted and more direct way.
I also did a simple wedding card animation to mimic the opening and closing of a real card to add a satisfying finishing-touch to the main invite; leaving enough time in between for recipients to read the information.
Original video was sent with 1080 x 1080px dimensions
Each invite was designed using 1080 x 1080 pixel dimensions as this is the size that displays the full image within Whatsapp chat (for easy access to information), without having to click into the image. This avoids guests missing out on information, should they not have a habit of clicking into images, as Whatsapp only shows a portion of the image in chat if the image is longer.
