Bella & Matthew's Engagement Invitations

Every so often I get the opportunity to work on something a bit different than what I normally do. At the end of last year, I was asked by one of my best mates to design some invitations with hand-lettered envelopes for him and his partner's engagement party.

The project involved me creating the invitations on A6 recycled kraft card, as well as hand-lettering over 60 envelopes; some of which were more detailed than others due to the need for guests' surnames and addresses. These invitations were then to be sealed with a custom antique gold wax seal for extra decoration.

After sitting down and chatting with Matt and Bella about what they envisioned their engagement invitations to look like, we all agreed on a minimalistic approach to ensure the information was easy to read and not overcrowded by other elements. Bella suggested to include a symbol of their overlapping fingerprints which, when angled, formed a love heart shape. So not long after the meeting, they provided me with two sheets of their inked fingerprints; of which I scanned and selected a couple of the best prints, blew them up to a larger scale, printed them out, then traced over them using a fineliner. I then scanned the drawings into the computer and used Adobe Illustrator to create the vector files of these fingerprints, eventually rotating them to produce the final design.

As for the 60+ hand-lettered envelopes, each one was initially planned out with a pencil and ruler, before going over the lettering in fineliner. Though this was a more time-consuming, I felt it was a necessary procedure to ensure that the lettering was perfectly crafted and evenly spaced before making the final version of it in pen, as well as to ensure all envelopes looked consistent.

Due to confidentiality reasons, I am unable to show the envelope designs that included the guests' surnames and addresses, but the surnames were done in an all-lowercase script lettering style, and the addresses were done in a smaller, all-uppercase sans serif style, centered below the guest name(s).