While working on that last major work project, one of the additional complications that I haven’t mentioned before was that I also had to plan a wedding. Anyone that has gotten married knows that planning a wedding can be time consuming.

Making the Wedding Ours

Angi and I spent a lot of time and effort into planning this wedding. We wanted it to be very much “ours” and to reflect our personalities well. I know there are a lot of guys out there that leave much of the wedding planning to the bride, often because many brides have planned their dream wedding from an early age it seems, but my Angi wasn’t like that. I tried to stay involved with every aspect of the wedding (finding/choosing the church, reception hall, caterer, florist, rehearsal dinner, etc.). I think the only part I wasn’t involved with was the dress part; I wasn’t allowed.

Branding Our Wedding

On top of all that, I wanted to brand our wedding by designing the invitations, programs and website myself. This was something that was inspired a little bit by Jason Santa Maria (Branding Your Wedding).

My goal was to have invitations that were unique and like no one else’s wedding. I looked at a lot of samples of invitations and was unimpressed with the bulk of them. Far too often, the invitations would use one font and often only one text size throughout, which made nothing stand out.

When I took this project on, I knew my work project was supposed to be complete almost three months before the wedding. Unfortunately, my work project started a little later than planned and took longer to complete so the two overlapped. There were days that I spent a long day working on that project and then a long night working on the wedding stuff. That was an extremely stressful time!

How Did It Turn Out?

Overall, it turned out well! I didn’t spend as much time on the website as I would’ve liked, but it still turned out ok. I’m little happier with how the invitations and programs turned out design-wise. Unfortunately, while I’ve been doing some graphic design (completely self-taught) for almost 10 years now, most of my designs have been for the web; print is not exactly my area of expertise. They both printed out fairly well though, but they could’ve been better.

Of course, I’m kind of a perfectionist so I always think things could’ve been better. We did get a lot of compliments on them though and they were unique.

One semi-major problem with the invitations turned out to be the dimensions when we tried to mail them. It turns out that the USPS started charging $0.13 more for mail that isn’t the standard elongated rectangle shape so a large stack of invitations were returned to us. Even worse though, was that for some of the invitations they didn’t return, they made the person we sent them to pay $0.13 to get their invitation. I’m only aware of that happening to a few people, but it probably happened to more and they just never had heart to tell us about it. That was super embarrassing!

So How About The Rest?

The rest of the wedding turned out great! I think it was very much us. For the ceremony, we used a lot of really cool music done instrumentally on the piano. We used some Journey (“Open Arms”), Lionel Ritchie, Kenny Rogers (“Through The Years”, a favorite of my mom’s), The Beatles (“Here, There and Everywhere”), Billy Joel (“She’s Got a Way”, for the bride, which was incredible!), John Lennon (“Grow Old With Me”) and finally, we left on Queen (“My Best Friend”), which was fun! We were very happy with how all the music worked out.

The reception was cool. The place we had it had a very cool feel to it, the food was good (what little we actually got to eat), the cake was good, the dancing was good (the DJ was a friend of Angi’s and a great DJ), etc. With the exception of us being pulled in a million different directions all night, we had a great time.