DESCRIPTION Ryan and Jeshurun Wedding Invitation CLIENT Ryan and Jeshurun DATE February 2010 DESIGN CREDITS Jeshurun Webb PRINT CREDITS Invitation: Spoon&Sailor Letterpress Other materials: Jeshurun Webb TYPE CREDITS Sabon (Jan Tschichold) Trade Gothic (Jackson Burke) Arnhem (Fred Smeijers)

QUANTITY PRODUCED 100 PRODUCTION COST $500 PRODUCTION TIME 1 month DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH Invitations: 6 in × 9 in PRINT METHOD Letterpress Inkjet PAPER STOCK Letra NUMBER OF COLORS 2 Spot

Ryan and Jeshurun developed their wedding materials with a series of elements that spoke to their history together, as well as what life had in store for each one of them at that moment. They met in a coffee shop, he manages a coffee shop, she was about to graduate from school and had access to a press…

Of course, as a graphic designer, there is some pressure to make your wedding invites a slice of design perfection. And on top of that, I was finishing my Master’s thesis in graphic design at RISD at the same time I was planning the wedding. Whew! Surprisingly, the invitations came together organically and without much stress. My husband Ryan manages a coffee shop, and we met in a coffee shop, so it seemed natural to incorporate that element as a design detail. Coffee plants are actually quite beautiful. I also recycled burlap coffee bags from his work by cutting them into small rectangles and attaching some home-made buttons of my own design to be used at the place settings.

I letterpressed my Save the Date’s at RISD and attached gorgeous hand-dyed silk ribbon (from Hanah Silk Ribbon) to create the bookmarks. To continue the book theme, I stacked books I had at home into the shape of a wedding cake and then photographed them and traced them loosely in Illustrator to create the invitations. My friend Elana at Spoon&Sailor Letterpress handled the printing of the invites since I wanted a perfect color-match and some additional letterpress expertise.

A rubber stamp and scalloped note cards from Paper Source made the RSVP’s a breeze. The menu was simply ink-jet printed on my Canon at home.
Shades of gray were the main color scheme, while shots of fuschia tied it all together.

As in most projects, there is a lesson to be kept (sometimes small and cheap, sometimes big and expensive):

I learned it is best to go to the letterpress experts, but I’m glad I fumbled my way through printing the save the dates myself. I like the salty look of how they came out. And cheap ribbon will not do, having the hand-dyed silk ribbon made all the difference.