So, after searching and pondering and a few sheets of idle doodling, it finally clicked. The map cards weren’t quite right for us, but I had the idea to do a timeline, instead. Something like this:
Timeline Save the Date by Etsy seller Peaches Bonnema
And then it hit me:
Vintage!
No, not that kind of vintage. Not the vintage that everyone and her bridesmaid are absolutely head-over-heels for, I’m talking wine vintages. After all, the wedding is wine-themed, it makes perfect sense!
Front and back (side by side) of what would be considered a “rack card” or insert, about 1/3 of a standard letter-sized sheet, landscape oriented.
After a bit of playing around with ideas, I decided on this mock-up. The timeline down the right side starts with our birth years and goes to the present. Why so far back? Well, one of the things that prompted me to message Mr. Road Trip back on SoulGeek was that I noticed he lived in the town I was born in. Considering it’s not that big a town, I figured I had to say something about it. And then while he’d unknowingly “followed” me from his home town to mine, he very knowingly followed me to my (now our) adopted town not too long after.
Which is where those vertical lines along the left side come into play–in this mock-up they’re a placeholder for the grape vines I’ll draw in over them. The diagonal bridges, meanwhile, represent location shifts. (The left-most line is T’s Nebraska line, the middle our shared Louisiana line, and the right the Florida line… make sense now?) Since we’ll be doing a wine blending ritual during our ceremony, this visual “blending” of our vines over the course of our lives appeals to me. The frame around the dates is also a place-holder; I blended together some standard Photoshop frames to get something like what I was after, but the finished version will be hand-drawn by moi and then scanned and cleaned up enough for printing.
In addition to the drawing bits, I still have to decide if I’m going to print them myself or upload them for printing elsewhere. I originally designed them to be printed at home, 3-up on pretty card stock, but my home printer is starting to show signs of age when it prints (some draggy bits here and there), not to mention I’d really love this on some nice, thick stock, thicker than it could easily handle. I even considered printing each side separately and gluing the two pieces together to create the heft I was after. Printing elsewhere would cost me around $15 plus shipping, so that’s not too bad, plus it would mean I could easily add more color to the finished product, rather than just printing in dark brown ink on cream stock.
And why not have them printed at my office? It is a commercial print shop, after all. Simple: I’m not inviting the vast majority of my coworkers, so I’d like to keep the details private as far as they’re concerned.
You know the really sad thing? I’ve had this idea in mind for months, but kept putting it off because I couldn’t get my sketches to look just right. After all that, it only took a couple of hours to bang out this mock-up tonight and now most of the job is done. That’s what I get for over-thinking things, isn’t it?
How long did it take you to decide on/design your Save the Date cards?