In April of 2007, my wife, Jess and I got married outside of Vegas. We were accompanied by our immediate families, best man (and his wife) and matron of honor (and her husband.) Afterwards, we had a reception for everyone back at home. Jess and I wanted every part of the wedding to be reflective of us as people. We didn’t want to have another cookie-cutter wedding, so we started breaking the rules.

One day we were out having lunch with one of Jess’ friends when I saw a Jimi Hendrix concert poster. We were in the market for cool ideas, and that 60′s concert poster vibe worked just right. We’re not hippies or anything of the sort, but we wanted to make a splash with our first mailing. I drew up our Save The Date in a sketch pad, scanned it in, and then recreated it using Illustrator. This allowed me to push the design and work in the colors.

For the invitation, we wanted something that actually reflected our interests. I came up with the idea of a comic book that told the story of how we met. For the cover, I found a photo of Jess and I and then worked from that. That pencil drawing was scanned in, manipulated and colored in PhotoShop. I used Illustrator to create the logos. The interior pages followed a similar pattern. Drawn in pencil and ink, scanned in, and then lettered in Illustrator. Jess helped write the dialog for the story.

We didn’t have a lot of money for the invitations, so we found creative ways to cut costs. The back page of the invitation doubled as directions. Also, we had everyone RSVP online at a website that I set up.

Once the invitations were sent out, I started working on the place cards. Since we were getting married outside of Vegas, we wanted to incorporate Vegas into our Rhode Island reception. Since the hall we reserved had a main center dance floor, we figured that each table could be a different hotel on the Vegas strip. I found pictures of the different hotels and casinos and began tracing them in Illustrator. For the actual reception our colors were black and white. This would make my job easier. But not easy.

The first hotel I traced was the Luxor. No problem. A nice easy pyramid with a sphinx. The second hotel that I traced was Excalibur. Due to my excitement for this project, I ended up being over-zealous with this hotel. I drew in each window of each building. Unfortunately, I had set the bar a lot higher than I had initially planned. By the time I finished all 13 hotels, I had spent between 40 and 50 hours tracing hotels and drawing in hundreds of windows. We also printed large versions to mark each table.

The end result was great. From the Save the Date, to the Elvis photo that we used for our Thank You cards (we had an Elvis impersonator as our limo driver. And not just any Elvis, it was old, fat Elvis!) everyone seemed to enjoy the personal touch that was evident in all phases of the wedding.