When Allison and I decided to get married, we debated the idea of elopement versus the traditional 2,000-person affair with punch and pie for everyone. On the one hand, not having any guests was bound to save us boatloads of money and stress. But on the other hand, it was also bound to rankle our close friends and relations that they didn't get to see us wear fancy clothes, or to hear us say pretty words to each other, or to throw things at us when it was all over.
We opted for the no-guests deal, and along with that, we decided to do a great deal of outreach. A 44-cent stamp buys an awful lot of good will, particularly when it's paired with a happy occasion, a lovely message, and a simple, elegant design idea.
Unfortunately, simple and elegant were not words in my design vocabulary. Enter my wife-to-be, who let me run wild with graphic representations of bubbles and champagne and sunsets before finally reining me back in to a straightforward concept she had been suggesting all along: the New York City skyline in silhouette.
Here, then, was the starting point of our wedding theme:
From there, the ideas came out practically unbidden – extending the Empire State Building high above the rest of the building tops; a single color element; a slender, playful, cosmopolitan font. Put it all together and it yielded this design, intended for the front side of an announcement card:
We got married near the Cloisters Museum in Fort Tryon Park, high up above the Hudson River, overlooking the Palisades and the George Washington Bridge. While Brooklyn's bridge is widely considered the more seminal representative of New York City's exit routes, the George made for an absolutely lovely backdrop, and served as our inspiration for the reverse side of the announcement card, too.
There was only one problem: in keeping with the design statement from the front of the card, I wanted a red element. But I couldn't think of one.
Enter my dear friend Armen, who asked me if we were planning to get married at the Little Red Lighthouse – a question that had been posed earlier by my 8-year-old nephew. When I told Armen I didn't know what the Little Red Lighthouse was, he took me to Barnes & Noble, marched me into the children's section, and bought me and Allison copy of the book titled, appropriately enough, The Little Red Lighthouse. Just like that, I had my red element.
Although we did not invite them to our wedding, our friends and family were nonetheless generously forthcoming with gifts. Because we are reasonably polite people (and because I was looking for one more reason to trot out the old skyline silhouette and play with it some more), we decided to design thank-you cards in keeping with the theme of our announcements and such. This time, the red element was a little prop plane trailing a banner behind it, flying at a comfortable altitude above the buildings:
By the time all was said and done, we had a reasonably robust stationery set. I even threw together a somewhat slapdash website to show off some of our photos.
Part of the plan all along – and, in fact, a good reason we were willing to brave the consternation of our loved ones – was that Allison and I would get married to each other every year, and that we would take the show on the road, too. So right after we got hitched, Allison's mom started planning for our first road trip to her house in Colorado. In addition to having an absolute blast, it was also another reason for us to drag the old simple-and-elegant out of mothballs and update it so we could send out another round of thank-yous. Here was the 2011 edition:
Mallison's 2012 wedding is set for Vegas, so a fun design will be forthcoming. And if you'd like to book us for a ceremony in your neck of the woods, call today!
© 2011, Pie a la Mode Productions