Jacob Wood
Objective
Produce signs and graphics for our wedding at a reasonable cost.

My wife and I were married on September 18, 2021 which turned out to be a beautiful San Diego day. We opted to do a majority of the preparation ourselves and this was a great excuse to try my hand in some graphic design.

Inputs

After we settled on our wedding venue, the Garty Pavilion in Mission Bay, my wife and I started to look over some wedding decoration styles. We were hoping to create an environment that was fun and light to match our outdoor bayside venue. The colors for the rest of the wedding were slate blue and sage green, and the bulk of our floral decoration was loose eucalyptus.

Fonts

A common theme used in graphic design is a set of paired or complementary fonts which together form a nice contrast. We decided a softer, loopy font (similar to everything you'll find on Etsy) would work well against something more structured but similarly light.

We selected Beatrica by Balpirick Studio from the Calligraphy section on dafont as a nice looking (but not completely over the top) loopy font:

Amatic Small Caps from Google Fonts seemed to provide an appropriate complement whilst maintaining a light and semi-whimsical feeling:

Graphics

After a bit of poking around on Etsy and Pinterest I really came to like the look of light, splashy watercolor backgrounds. They seemed to fit our desired environment well and provide enough variability to create a few different graphics without repetition.

The majority of the graphics I used were found through freepik.com or Vecteezy.com.

Process

The pieces that we decided were needed for the wedding were:

The graphics were developed almost exclusively in Inkscape. This was my first time working extensively with vector graphics and I found it to be very liberating, even with my limited skillset. I will leverage and recommend vector graphics for any future design work.

One-offs

Many of the items listed above (most of the signs and cards) were one-off pieces. In this case the design process was pretty simple:

Escort Cards

The "Table Number signs" and the "Table Assignment escort cards" required generating a large number of similar images for printing. These images were built slightly differently than the one-off images to reduce the manual work to a bare minimum, mostly so that I didn't have to make the exact same changes on 180 images when we inevitably changed our mind on the desired color or font (which we did, multiple times).

The escort cards were generated with a simple template and text-overlay script written in Julia, utilizing ImageMagick for the image generation. The script takes in a CSV with names and table assignments, along with a template image (sized to accommodate the longest name!), and spits out .pdfs ready for printing and slicing.

# namesCSV has 2 columns: name, table
names = CSV.read(namesCSV, DataFrame)
names[!,"first"] .= ""
names[!,"last"] .= ""

for (i,r) in enumerate(eachrow(names))
    r.first = join(split(r.name)[1:end-1], " ") # Some of the list is "Mom & Baby LastName", want to keep "Mom & Baby" together
    r.last = split(r.name)[end]
end

sort!(names, :last) # Currently sorted by table number, would be better to sort by last name

# make all the images
for (i,r) in enumerate(eachrow(names))
    cmd = "magick convert -font Beatrica -pointsize 180 -gravity center -annotate +0+0 '$(r.first)\n$(r.last)' -font Amatic-SC-Bold -pointsize 120 -annotate +415-260 '$(r.table)' $template pics/$i.png"
    run(`$(split(cmd))`)
end

#stuff all the images into printable pdfs
p = 1
for i in 1:8:nrow(names)
    cmd = "magick montage  pics/$(i+0).png  pics/$(i+1).png  pics/$(i+2).png  pics/$(i+3).png  pics/$(i+4).png  pics/$(i+5).png  pics/$(i+6).png pics/$(i+7).png -tile 2x4 -border 5 -geometry +0+0 pdfs/$p.pdf"
    run(`$(split(cmd))`)
    p = p+1 
end

The cards were printed out and left just the right amount of room for a 2-3 sentence personalized handwritten note on the back for all of our lovely guests. Here is my brother's escort card:

Table Number Signs

The table number signs were a little more fun. We used similar pictures of my wife Erin and I, taken when we were the age of the table number (so the table 7 sign had pictures of us both at age 7). The templating here was more detailed, because the pictures were not always the same size and sometimes lent themselves more towards a landscape or portrait crop. The inputs to the templating script were thus:

tabletemplateim1x1y1w1h1im2x2y2w2h2texttextsize
1l1e.jpg0320223724851j.jpg06021252360One650
2l2e.jpg8576197821972j.jpg039622222468Two650
3p3e.jpg012300019093j.jpg20030426481685Three650

The images are rendered with an ImageMagick composite command by layering together a white background, the two (cropped) input images, the overlay template, and then the title text.

templates = Dict(
    "l" => ("landscape5.png",       4200,3000,  200,600,1800,2000,  2200,600,1800,2000, -1100), 
    "ls"=> ("landscape_skinny5.png",4200,3000,  500,600,1500,2000,  2200,600,1500,2000, -1100),
    "p" => ("portrait3.png",        3000,4200,  400,600,2200,1400,  400,2300,2200,1400, -1650),
    "s" => ("single1.png",          3000,4200,  250,725,2500,3000,  250, 725,2500,3000, -1650),
    )

coords = CSV.read("coords.csv", DataFrame)
for r = eachrow(coords)
    
    outfile = "out/" * string(r.table) * ".png"
    t = templates[r.template]

    cmd = """magick convert  \\
            -font Beatrica -pointsize $(r.textsize) -stroke black \\
            -size $(t[2])x$(t[3]) xc:white \\
            \\( $(r.im1) -crop $(r.w1)x$(r.h1)+$(r.x1)+$(r.y1) \\) -geometry $(t[6])x$(t[7])+$(t[4])+$(t[5]) -composite \\
            \\( $(r.im2) -crop $(r.w2)x$(r.h2)+$(r.x2)+$(r.y2) \\) -geometry $(t[10])x$(t[11])+$(t[8])+$(t[9]) -composite \\
            $(t[1]) -composite \\
            -gravity center -draw "text 0,$(t[12]) '$(r.text)'" \\
            $outfile"""
    
    run(`$(split(cmd))`, wait=false)
    sleep(0.1)
    
end

Outputs

Welcome

Bar #1

Bar #2

Cards & Gifts

Desserts

Guestbook

Escort Cards

Table Numbers

Bridesmaid Cards

Wedding Favor labels

Ingredients