One of the coolest things about my relationship with Dorena (my wife after the 15th of May, currently my fiancé) is that we’re both creative people. She went to school to become a graphic designer, and I am a web designer. We decided early on that we would handle most of – if not all – of the creative elements related to the wedding. I just wanted to document the process of our branding the wedding, so I have something to look back on in a few years.

Dorena and I have been together since the spring of 2000, and we’ve pretty much always known that we’d be together for the rest of our lives. I proposed to her on Christmas Eve in 2007, and we figured that we’d aim for a date as close to our dating anniversary as possible. We started dating May 18th, which is a Monday in 2009, so we opted for the Friday before, the 15th. A huge advantage of this entire process was having an entire year to plan things out. There hasn’t been anything rushed, nor have there been major complications. It was always assumed that I’d create a website for the wedding (which I did: http://keithanddorena.com), and Dorena would handle all of the print media, such as invitations and place cards, et cetera. I felt that we should treat it as any other project we’d tackle, and come up with a theme that would carry over throughout all aspects of the wedding.

I don’t normally date my sketchbooks that I use to store work notes in, but there happens to be a 7/13/08 written on the page directly before these sketches appear, so we’ll say I came up with this ‘coat of arms’ idea in mid-July 2008.

Original Sketch

My Final Product in Photoshop

Dorena’s Final Products from Illustrator

It’s fun seeing the progression from sketch, to inefficient Photoshop design, to polished vector illustrations all in one spot. It’s the first time I’ve seen them together, and I’m pretty happy with the results. This was the design we anchored everything around, from the invitation…

To the RSVP cards…

To the address labels…

To the website…

Original Sketch

Photoshop Mockup

Final Site (Click to Visit)

A favorite little touch of mine, is the horizontal rule that I designed for the website. For those unfamiliar with HTML, a horizontal rule just creates a visual divider (a line that typically spans the width of the page) in a page of content. Again, I utilized the Coat of Arms that I came up with…

I’ve done a lot of branding over the last few years, but I’ve primarily worked with established clients, that had logos and designs in place. It was a great process crafting a brand and implementing it on my own (with some help from my extremely talented soon-to-be wife). The website was another grand achievement because it’s the first time I’ve used my developmental PHP core (along the lines of CakePHP or other PHP frameworks). It performs very well, and it’s not that difficult to use. I’m planning on wrapping up a beta release some point over the summer, and hope to have it released for other people to play around with then. It’s a little frightening thinking about PHP developers looking over and scrutinizing my code, since I’m not a developer by design (ha, get it?), but it’s also exciting to know that I can code something this in-depth.

An interesting thing that I’d like to document is the attempt at digitizing the RSVPs. We figured that a large majority of the people coming to the wedding were computer savvy, or at least had the ability to send an email, so we opted to try our hand at only giving mail back RSVPs to the old goats that didn’t even have computers.

The formula was simple, as outlined in the RSVP card above; Send an email to rsvp@KeithAndDorena.com and let us know if you’re coming or not. We sent our invitations out (albeit a little later than I anticipated) in the last week of February, and gave a deadline of April 24th. A week later we started getting mailed responses, but the emails were very few and far between. After two weeks of having invitations out, there were only seven responses out of the nearly thirty we sent out. I started thinking that the email address was screwing up at some point, either in the receiving on my server’s end, or the synchronization to Outlook, but all of my tests worked immediately. I crafted an RSVP form and slapped it on the home page of our website, and less than a day later I had seven more responses. By the end of the week, all were accounted for.

It opens an interesting discussion, is it too difficult to send an email to a new person? Do people respond better if the person they’re contacting is already in their contact list? Why would someone visit a website daily, when hardly any attention was brought to it on the RSVP card? It’s incredibly curious to me, and I’ll probably never find out why this phenomena occurred, but I figured I’d point it out to those that were thinking of doing the same thing. I wonder if there will be the same resistance with the digitizing of other traditional mail-based correspondences…

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