Like it or not, wedding season is approaching, and if they haven’t started already, many of us will soon start seeing scads of wedding and bridal shower invitations infiltrating our mailboxes. And chances are good that many of them will miscommunicate in one way or another.
They say that the invitation sets the tone for your wedding, because it’s the first official taste of the event that your guests will experience (that is, unless they’ve been keeping up with your wedding web site, wedding planning blog and monthly newsletters). As a graphic designer and frequent wedding guest, I fully agree. Yet, an alarming 87.5% of the wedding invitations that have made their way into my mailbox have been either (a) stylistically (as far as tone and formality) unrelated to the actual wedding event, (b) poorly executed in design and/or production, (c) overly precious, or (d) practically unreadable and/or unclear regarding event details. Invitation miscommunication is clearly a concept that not a lot of people understand. Or maybe all of my friends and relatives are supremely lacking in design savvy.
Nevertheless, having some expertise in the field of graphic design, and invitation design in particular, I’d like to offer some insight on the subject of invitation miscommunication. I’m not going to bore you with technical details about readability and legibility and typefaces and kerning and leading and color and line and balance, symmetry, unity, harmony, and postal regulations. Not yet, anyway, and only if you really want me to. Instead, I’m going to have some fun this week, and we’re going to look at what different wedding invitations might be unintentionally saying without actually saying what they’re saying, if you know what I’m saying.
But since no self-respecting suite of wedding stationery is complete without a Save-the-Date notice, let’s start there, shall we?
(Too small to fully appreciate? You can see it larger here.)
