Project Description

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to design wedding invitations for Maria Vitale and Charles Mattingly's destination wedding to Charleston, South Carolina. Maria and Charles wanted to have an intimate destination wedding weekend full of events for family and friends. The vision for their wedding stationery was to capture elegance and Southern charm while incorporating classic calligraphy and their palette of pale greens and gold. Maria's wedding planners had showed me images of their inspiration for her wedding decor, and I was particularly struck by the natural beauty of South Carolina and I loved their idea of hanging candle lanterns from the mossy trees for their evening reception. After looking over their inspiration, I decided to paint images of South Carolina and colorful Charleston in watercolors. I painted the historical skyline of downtown, and I painted landscape elements to use throughout the suite. I designed an additional RSVP card and reception card with these landscape elements. I designed certain text elements in black calligraphy and added them to the invitation suite. Maria's wedding planners requested a small booklet that features the destination wedding weekend events, local attractions, and restaurant recommendations. The printer only offered to saddle stitch the booklets with staples, but I knew that would not look quite elegant, so I chose to use some bookbinding skills. I hand-bound each booklet with taupe bookbinding thread and simple pamphlet stitching.

I designed the invitation, RSVP card, and reception card and had them printed digitally on Mohawk Superfine Smooth White 100# paper. The booklet was printed on 70# coated text weight paper. The invitations were mailed in 70# spearmint opaque envelopes with RSVP envelopes. I embellished the spearmint envelopes with metallic gold calligraphy ink, and chose floral vintage postage stamps to complete the look.