Posts filed under 'DIY'
Courtesy of Kodak’s Easy Share Gallery and Design magnate Martha Stewart, its now easier and cuter than ever to create photo thank-you cards for your wedding!
The two have teamed together to offer several designs that can be used with your choice of horizontal or vertical photos. You can even include your own custom message under “Thank You” (although I chose not to in my examples below.”)
Most of the designs available are brown and blue, which is oh so of-the-moment but may not be your cup of tea. If so, there is one cream version available.. hopefully they will expand their color combos soon.
At $10.90 per set of ten they work out to be just over $1 a piece and even come with envelopes in either white, green or red.
Give it a try here!
April 24th, 2007
For the DIY bride, font choice can make the difference between boring and beautiful!
Fortunately, free and fabulous fonts are in no scarce supply on the web. Here are some of my favorites for wedding invitations, programs, favor tags, seating cards etc.
The ES series of fonts is a large free collection of fairly traditional script fonts, any of which would be appropriate for DIY programs or invitations.
Here are some of the ones I like best from the collection, but there are many more available at http://freefonts.fateback.com/es_typography/
The ES Caps font makes a great traditional monogram as shown above.
To see some of the ES fonts in action, visit the ES Page on Fontplay.com where they have several examples of the ES fonts as used in images such as this example of the Centurion font as used on an image from Printshop:
Another great wedding font is Nuptial BT which is not free, but luckily the knock off “Marriage Script” is:
I used Nuptial for the inside of my programs and my menus:
You can download Marriage Script free from EKNP.com.
So far we’ve focused on fairly traditional script fonts, but there are also wonderful informal handwritten fonts that I think are perfect for more casual affairs. Here are some of my personal favorites:
I used the font Monika for the Couple’s names in these little birdie favor tags I designed for a country themed wedding:
All three of these fonts can be downloaded from one of my favorite font sources Urban Fonts:
Monika, Lainie Day and More Enchanted Prairie Dog
How to Install on a PC computer
Fonts generally come in zip files. Download the zip file to your computer and unzip the folder. Do not directly unzip the contents (which is usually a TTF file and another text read me document) into your Windows/Fonts folder. Unzip it somewhere into your documents and then navigate to that location. Click once on your font and then copy or move the font into your C:/Windows/Fonts folder. Your computer should pop up a dialogue box showing that its installing the font. It will say installing one of one and the font name.
Thats it! Now open any program that uses fonts such as MS Word and you’ll see your new font in the list.
Also see this previous post on fonts and dingbats for more DIY wedding design ideas!
April 12th, 2007
If you are DYIing your own paper products, chances are you want to use a font that is slightly more elegant than say Times New Roman. Fortunately for DIY brides, beautiful free fonts abound on the web! Here are some of my favorite sources:
http://www.dafont.com/
http://www.fontfreak.com/
http://www.houseoflime.com/
http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts-e3.html
http://www.specialtyfonts.com/deco/index.htm
http://www.listemageren.dk/fontarkiv/index.htm
How to Install on a PC computer
Fonts generally come in zip files. Download the zip file to your computer and unzip the folder. Do not directly unzip the contents (which is usually a TTF file and another text read me document) into your Windows/Fonts folder. Unzip it somewhere into your documents and then navigate to that location. Click once on your font and then copy or move the font into your C:/Windows/Fonts folder. Your computer should pop up a dialogue box showing that its installing the font. It will say installing one of one and the font name.
Thats it! Now open any program that uses fonts such as MS Word and you’ll see your new font in the list.
Dingbats & Webdings
Dingbats and Webdings are fonts that are not letters but rather collections of symbols or graphics usually based around a theme. The beauty of these little guys is that because fonts are inherently “vector” art they can be sized up to any dimension without losing quality or pixelating like say a jpg will.
You won’t have any trouble sizing dingbats to the appropriate resolution on your maps or invitations but you WILL have a problem if you find an image you like on the web and and decide it makes the perfect motif for your invitations. It will look fine on your screen, but when you go to print it, it will look fuzzy. This is because web graphics are 72 dots per inch (or DPI) where as printing requires a much higher resolution image, usually 300dpi.
So, for example if you decide you want a starfish as a motif for your beach-themed wedding, you are MUCH better off searching for a dingbat you can install on your computer than if you found a cute jpg of a dingbat by doing a google image search. Part of the reason is the resolution, but also because your google image starfish will most likely have a white or colored background which will prevent you from layering it over anything but the same color white.
Dingbats can be used for many different things from flourishes and motifs, to background design elements and map symbols.
Finally, Some Examples!
Here are a few different versions of a monogram/logo I did for a beach-themed wedding:
Obviously the big “W” is an alphabet font, but the starfish, Flip Flops and Hibiscus Flower were all symbols from a dingbat font called “Tropicana BV” available for download at Dafont.com: http://www.dafont.com/tropicana-bv.font
Here is a jpg of the front of my map insert:
And the back:
Every little graphic in this map insert is a dingbat font including the buildings, the plane symbol, the flourishes in between the hotel names and even the frame around our names!
Dingbat fonts as overlays..
One other example of how you can use a font to add a design element is by making it very large and low opacity like I did in our invitation design:
The bright white lily in the bottom left is a jpg, but the floral motif is from a beautiful set of floral fonts called “in my garden” also available at dafont.com: http://www.dafont.com/in-my-garden.font
There are, of course, hundreds of examples and it would take hours to go through all of them, but please feel free to post specific questions if you have any!
October 18th, 2006
Brides on the Knot have been forgoing the traditional “sign-your-name-here” guest book for ages. While there are many alternatives, one that is growing in popularity is the polaroid guestbook. The folks at Adesso Albums have even created an album specifically for this purpose, it includes a window in each page where you slide the polaroid in:
While this is a great option for many brides, there are a few drawbacks, namely price (they run about $60 each) and flexibility - the pages are bound in, so if you have more groups of guests than pages you need two albums.
For my wedding I not only wanted that flexibility, I also wanted the book to look more like it fit in with the theme of my wedding. Already burdened with too many last minute DIY projects, I was thrilled when my graphic designer sister Roxanne offered to take this project over as her gift to us.
We decided on the Newbury album from Kolo:
The album fit all our requirments: It come in many different colors (we chose “camel”) It had a window so we could personalize it with our picture or logo, and best of all it is expandable. It comes with 20 sheets, is expandable to 30 sheets - which means that you can have up to 60 pages which should cover you for at least 120 guests (The adesso album hold only 30 pictures and so half as many guests.)
The other benefit of an expandable album is that you can actually take it apart at the wedding and have people signing pages simultaneously.
The Final Result
Here’s how our guestbook looked with our logo printed in the window:
And here are some of the inside pages filled out by the guests:
Other Tips
I get asked alot about the camera and film. We bought the Poloaroid 600 camera at walmart. I can’t remember the exact price but I think it was around $32. I do remember seeing it at Walgreens cheaper because they often have sales/rebates on the camera. By far the best deal on the film that we found (polaroid film can be very expensive!) was from Costco. They came in packs of 50. We figured we’d need 60, so we bought one extra single pack of 10 exposures at Walgreens. We ended up with one extra pack. So for our 90 guests we used about 50 exposures.
To adhere the poloroid to the guestbook, we used that rollon craft glue stuff that people use for scrapbooking that should be available at your local craft store. Here’s an example of one from Sav-on-Crafts:
Definitely ask a close friend to “man” the guestbook. This was something we decided at the last minute, but probably saved the whole project. I heard later that he was very (gently) persistant at asking people to please have their picture taken and sign the book… and its probably thanks to him that we got as many pages filled out as we did.
That should be all the information you need to create your own photo guestbook. let me know how yours turns out!
August 12th, 2006
