Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Our wedding invitations


I've been dying to show you our wedding invitations, and now that most of our guests have seen them, here they are! If you remember, the stationery was one of those things that we decided from the beginning were very important to us. J is a designer so we always knew he'd design something for the occasion. I was in charge of the text and of course there were several discussions during the process on whether words or design are more important!


We started with the colour red and the idea to reflect the wedding venue. As we're getting married in a beautiful old castle we used the medieval theme throughout the invitations, with the stamp on the envelopes or the icon of a knight proposing to his lady (probably not very historically accurate, I know!). We also wanted the invitations to be fun and hopefully reflect that we want our day to be relaxed and not too formal.

We included a card with the basic details (what, who, when, where) and  another one with information on getting there and accommodation. We also designed single postcards for our RSVPs. Finding a printers was the most difficult part. There isn't really that much out there for those who want to design everything from scratch and not use a template or buy designed ones, but luckily we found a good printers in Oxford that did the whole thing for us.

We are really happy by how they've turned out and it's been really good fun giving them to people. And that's one thing ticked off the list!

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Good design is...


We went to the Design Museum in London at the weekend to visit a very interesting exhibition about the work of Dieter Rams, an industrial designer who was the Head of Design for Braun from 1961 to 1995. He's generally considered the inspiration behind many of Apple's designs, including the iPod and the MacBook, so I was already expecting clean and beautiful products. But I didn't expect to find his work and his vision of what good design is so inspiring. .


According to Rams:
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

(Copyright Dieter Rams, amended March 2003 and October 2009)



I was so inspired by his words that I actually took more photos of his quotations than the actual products, so I'll leave you with my favourites: