On June 26th, I will be getting married to my wonderful fiancée, Gina. Since most of the people we are inviting to our wedding have no idea what I do for a living, I knew this would be the perfect opportunity to show them. I spent a few months running through color palettes and collecting examples of design styles that I liked. Some of my friends saw this as very odd since wedding decisions aren’t typically handled by the male in the relationship, but I being a designer, I had to be involved. When I first sat down to design our wedding invitations, I was pretty sure I knew exactly what I wanted. After weeks of frustration working up various options, I began to realize that I wasn’t happy with any direction I was headed.

I decided to scrap everything I had done and start over. Since I absolutely loved the illustrations our former intern Josh Schwieger did for our Rosie and Glady t-shirts, I asked him to do an illustration of Gina and me from one of our engagement photos taken by the very talented Bob Ervin. The result was amazing and we knew it would work perfectly.

Detail shot of Adam and Gina’s wedding invitations

I decided to carry the hand-drawn look throughout by hand-lettering a short summary of our lives together — from the day we met to our wedding day. At this point I had completely embraced the idea of having a non-traditional wedding invitation, so I decided to make the invitation a very unique format. At 24 inches tall, the invitation conveniently folds down into four panels to fit in a standard A6 envelope.

Photo of Adam and Gina by Bob Ervin

When I asked printers for pricing, I was told by some that they couldn’t print at that size and by others that it would be too expensive. My only options were to change my design — which I was very attached to — or once again call on an Oxide intern. This time, it would be our current intern Adam Casey. Adam had just finished screen printing a set of posters for his senior show and is approaching expert status at screen printing. I spent a fair share of time screen printing in college, but that was two years ago, and without Adam’s help I could have never pulled this off.

I am very happy with how our invitations came out and am very thankful for everyone who helped me along the way. I’m also very excited to finally be able to use torpin.com.