Design your own wedding stationery - Getting inspired

Inspiration for designing wedding invitations and stationery can come in a variety of forms.  You may have seen invitations in a magazine or online that you love. You may have a colour scheme or wedding theme that gives you a starting point, or it may just be an idea, a'feeling' of what you would like the  finished product to be.  As a designer, my clients bring or send me a vast variety of material from which to draw inspiration. One couple recently asked me to create invitations telling me 'think cricket on the village green in the 1960's'.  Whilst this certainly didn't give me anything concrete to go on, that sentence did evoke a very strong image of how their wedding would be and the type of stationery that the were after.

When you are looking at ideas, don't just stick to looking at examples of wedding invitations and
stationery.  Look too at other elements of your wedding and begin to identify what inspires you as a whole.  Table decorations and flower arrangements, even the venue itself can inform your stationery design.  What colours are you going to feature, is there a particular element that is coming through your whole wedding scheme that could also be featured on your stationery.  Don't forget, your wedding stationery is more than just your invitations, your On the Day Stationery will also be on display to your guests and at the venue on your big day and getting it all designed to co-ordinate with other decorative elements can take a wedding scheme up another notch.

Collect all your ideas together in one place, a notebook or folder.  Tear pages out of magazines, scribble down ideas that come to you, request swatches of fabric that take your fancy, or get out your phone and snap a picture of a pattern that catches your eye. Generally, a collection of this type is called a mood board, and is used throughout the design world to capture the essence of what a person likes and inspires the designer along the right road.

Finally, don't be afraid to ask your wedding stationer if they can do things that you can't even imagine is able to be done.  One of my clients was planning on wearing her mothers wedding dress on her big day.  It was a beautiful vintage dress in ivory lace and my client asked me if I would be able to copy the lacework pattern and incorporate that into the stationery design.  She didn't hold out much hope when she asked me and got quite a pleasant surprise when I said 'yes, of course I can'.  In fact it's been my experience that I vary rarely say 'no' to my clients requests.  Even the most unusual requests are generally do-able in some way.

Some people have so much inspiration and so many ideas that they begin to feel unable to choose between them.  My advice would be to go with the idea that pulls the strongest, the one you keep returning to again and again.  Oftentimes this is the original idea you had, but not necessarily always.  Of course, sometimes choosing one thing isn't the right thing.  I once made invitations for a client who was getting married abroad.  She new exactly the style of invitation she wanted; a simple wallet style with ribbon trim.  The difficulty was in choosing the ribbon colour.  In fact she was having a hard time narrowing the entire wedding scheme down in terms of colour.  In the end, she decided that her indecision was, in fact, the answer and she had me make her invitations in 8 of the colours she liked the most, and then followed this 'multi colour' theme through to the wedding scheme.

Ultimately it doesn't matter how you get inspired, or what inspires you...the object is to end up with something that you love.  In that way, your wedding stationery says something about you and is therefore truly personal.