New Phases

Our tagline is “Constantly Creative” for a reason. Outside of work hours, and outside of client projects, we can’t help but apply our creativity to personal projects. Here’s a bittersweet personal project from me, Quentin:

A certain amount of any designer’s work hits the cutting room floor. It’s the nature of the business. But this one hits a little close to home.

This evening, @lizknowsher and I should be raising a glass to our family and friends to celebrate our wedding. For a year, she and I have worked on and planned for it. We’ve poured an immeasurable amount of creative energy (along with mental, emotional and physical energy) into it. Instead, today we’re toasting our marriage in our PJs with left-over wine and an evening jigsaw puzzle. These are the strange expressions of love in the time of corona.

All of that said: we’ve both kept a positive outlook through the past few weeks. It’s impossible to not find a little humor (gallows though it may be) in the situation. We married yesterday, in our home and in front of immediate family (and broadcast to friends near and far over the internet). It was beautiful.

Spun a better way, this work didn’t really hit the cutting room floor. These pieces still shipped out to far-flung family and friends. But it’s disappointing to know that while Liz and I should be hosting this invitation’s party at this hour, I’m instead posting the work to social media.

Here, I’ll post a few more details about some of these pieces, the inspiration behind them, and how they came together. #newphases2020

PINS

The first worriesome sign @lizknowsher and I received was word that these lapel pins we custom ordered from @madebycooper as wedding favors were delayed because of the virus. There was a chance they wouldn’t arrive in time for our reception. Much to Made By Cooper’s credit, they arrived with a few days to spare, but two days after we’d decided to postpone our reception. We’ll have to get out some Sharpies for Reception 2.0.

SAVE THE DATE, MAP & DETAIL CARDS

While @lizknowsher and I didn’t exactly pick a theme or style or colors for the wedding, we organically gravitated toward a moon theme, an Art Deco style (super original in 2020, right?) and black and gold. As always, though, function before form: we gave our guests a cheat sheet with all the key information in one place and a map showing our out-of-town guests our favorite places to go out. You know, back when we could go out.

RECEPTION & OPEN HOUSE

A week before the wedding, as the NCAA Tournament was being postponed and the Berkshire weekend was being canceled, @lizknowsher and I pulled the plug on the reception. We started scaling back on the wedding ceremony, too. It eventually became a ten immediate family members in our living room and a Zoom conference call.

To notify our guests, I quickly drew, printed and mailed a postcard directly inspired by one of our main influences for the event: Georges Méliès’ silent masterpiece “Le Voyage dans la Lune.” It seemed to fit the right tone of darkness and whimsy we were going for.

Weeks earlier, we’d used one of the printing plates from the invitation (see below) to make coasters on our tabletop platen letterpress.

INVITATIONS

@lizknowsher’s concept from the beginning was for our wedding reception to be “eerie but pretty.” We landed on the idea of a moon centerpiece, and I decided to base it on the actual phase of the moon on March 21 (7% illuminated waning crescent). To set the invite apart in the full set, we reversed the colors and letterpress printed it with gold foil and a blind emboss on super thick paper.

Mailed in black envelopes, we stamped our return address in gold ink and used gold pen (and @stegosaras and Liz’s perfect handwriting) for mailing addresses.