Saja + Aaron: The Science of a Custom Design (Part 1)

I recently designed a custom wedding invitation for one of my dearest friends, Saja, who is engaged to a charming young man named Aaron. I met Saja when I worked at the student newspaper in college and we are both very familiar with working on a deadline (and leaving things until the last minute!). Wedding planning was not immune to this habit.

At two months before the wedding, she had settled on a venue and a dress but not much else! Overwhelmed by the amount of decisions she had to make in a short time, she basically gave me free reign on invitation design with only a few key elements:

  1. A science and/or journalism theme. (He’s in food science; she’s in journalism.)
  2. Somewhat formal.
  3. Colors: red, teal and royal purple.

If you couldn’t already guess, blending science and journalism in a formal-ish invitation with bold jewel tones is a bit of a challenge (Saja teased me a couple days later by suggesting we add peacock feathers to the mix!).

The first two rounds of Saja and Aaron's custom wedding invitations.

Since time was of the essence, and I couldn’t come up with a brilliant fusion design of science and journalism, I just went with my gut. Playing off of the double meaning of “chemistry,” I created a graphic of an atom with a heart for the nucleus and two electrons (not scientifically accurate, I’ll admit!) and included a monogrammed option as well.

Saja and Aaron's invitation with variant borders.

I’d kept it fairly simple in order to heed Saja’s request of formality, but she and Aaron decided they’d prefer less white space without adding a plain border. Their next set of choices included two variant borders and a third fringed with multicolored bubbles.

In the end, Saja and Aaron preferred #3, which I thought appropriate given Saja’s bubbly personality!

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