Designing a (Gay) Wedding
Part 1 — Creating a Style and Brand
At the end of a warm and cloudless late-summer day in San Francisco, my then-boyfriend Steve invited me up to our apartment’s small roof deck for dinner. It seemed oddly unexpected, but I went up anyway. Outside in the still evening air, I found a thoughtfully romantic setup: mementos of our relationship, our favorite pizza, a nice bottle of champagne, and Steve waiting with a proposal — would I marry him?
After the initial shock subsided, I responded with an enthusiastic “yes” and asked him the same question in return. He was also keen on the idea. We were engaged!
After the initial thrill of the proposal, our dinner, and the calls and social media posts to share the good news with family and friends, a new realization set in: it was time to start planning a wedding. What had we gotten ourselves into?
Steve and I are immensely fortunate. We live in a country and at a time when our marriage is a legally-recognized possibility. We’re surrounded by supportive family and friends who eagerly cheer us on. We have the means to host a celebration for those closest to us. There are many — past and present — in far less fortunate circumstances.
To a certain degree, one’s wedding is an inherently self-centered event. It’s a celebration of you, your partner, and your relationship together.
But for us, our wedding also represented an opportunity to merge our overlapping communities, share a potentially new experience of diversity with the people we love, and throw a really great party for those who’ve supported us in our lives.
With those goals in mind, we set out to design an event that reflected our identities in an honest, fun, and stylish way. As a designer, I relished the opportunity to flex some familiar muscles (website design) and learn some new things as well (print design, event/space design, etc). And although Steve is not a designer by trade, he was more than willing to help along the way with feedback and support.
This is the first in a series of posts about my experience designing a wedding with my fiancé, and the things we learned along the way. In this post, I’ll focus on how we chose a theme and created a design system — unifying everything else we would make in order to pull off a successful event.
Choosing The Venue
The first step for us was finding a venue to host the ceremony and reception. The choice of venue constrains almost everything else: the date, the number of guests, the budget, the other vendors one needs to hire, and the design style of the wedding itself.
We did some rough calculations to estimate the number of guests that a venue would need to accommodate (Steve and I each have a large extended family whom we wanted to invite). We also decided that — since we love our hometown of San Francisco — we wanted to bring our friends and family together in a venue with a strong sense of place instead of a generic ballroom.
We gathered information from Here Comes the Guide, A Practical Wedding, The Knot, Yelp, and countless others. After wading through a staggering quantity of bride-centric material (do men do ANY wedding planning?!) we gathered an initial list of ~15 venus. Then we whittled the list down to just 3 favorites: the Julia Morgan Ballroom, the Imperial Floor at the Westin St. Francis, and the City Club of San Francisco. After availability checks, site visits, budget proposals, and some good old-fashioned negotiation, we decided on the Julia Morgan Ballroom and signed a contract. At that point, the snowball was rolling: we had a date and were on the hook to spend real money!
Creating A Style
Once the big decision on the venue had been made, it served as a foundation for all the other decisions we needed to make along the way.
The Julia Morgan Ballroom is in the Merchant’s Exchange Building in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Finished in 1904, it was one of only a few buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake, and one of the first to be repaired in order to create a focal point for the city’s rebirth. Now named for Julia Morgan, the famous architect who also designed Hearst Castle at San Simeon, the ballroom has hosted social events in the city for over a century. The interior is masculine with elements of Beaux-Arts architecture and Art Deco style, including wood paneling and interesting geometric patterns. The huge 15th floor windows look out onto other SF landmarks, giving it a strong sense of place.
The venue has an aesthetic that we love, and so we let the defining styles (Beaux-Arts and Art Deco) and the time period when they most strongly influenced US sensibilities (1880–1940) drive the design system that we created for the wedding. Starting from scratch with no constraints would have been a recipe for getting stuck on existing wedding cliches.
Working with the style and time period of the venue made the design process easier, and the outcome more unique.
It also had the benefit of requiring fewer design and decor elements to implement our style: the venue harmonized with what we added instead of needing to be papered over.
Taking a cue from brides everywhere, we created some Pinterest boards and gathered inspiration based on our chosen theme. Favorite finds included vintage liquor bottle labels and lettering from the beautiful Sanborn insurance maps. Pinterest turns out to be a really useful mood-boarding tool for projects like this, and it helped Steve and I to communicate with each other more easily about what we liked.
Brand Elements
To paraphrase Erik Spiekermann, “All a brand really needs is a color and a typeface.” We started by choosing colors and typefaces, and then built on that foundation with a few additional visual elements that I could combine to quickly produce work that gave a unified impression.
Colors
The peacock feather, an object commonly associated with Art Deco designs and fashion, served as the inspiration for our color palette.
A base of black, midnight blue, and white provided the backdrop for sparse accents of lighter blue and green. The high-contrast black and white evoke elegance and cosmopolitan style, while the brighter accents add a bit of fun and whimsy. Steve’s favorite color is green and mine is blue, so we were able to use the accent colors to differentiate between the two sides of the wedding party. We couldn’t rely on the typical dresses vs. suits to do it, so we used subtle color cues instead.
Typefaces
Just as important as a strong color palette is a set of typefaces to use consistently throughout the wedding materials. Our typeface selections were inspired by vintage liquor bottle labels. These labels typically create visual hierarchy using several typeface families instead of simply changing the color, size, or weight of a single family. We chose five so we’d have a broad range of styles to work with.
We also wanted to keep the cost of the project under control, so I limited myself to working mostly with typefaces available on Typekit (which is included in my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription). Luckily, there are a lots of quality options to choose from. Many of them can be used both on the web for website design and on the desktop for print design.
Gin by Fort Foundry — A typeface design literally based on lettering from vintage liquor bottle labels? Perfect! Gin was the first typeface we chose, and it beautifully stylized our main headings. It’s sturdy and a tad quirky, it evokes the right era, and it comes with fun ornametal words (“and”, “or”, “with”) via OpenType that make it easy to quickly add beautiful embellishments to text. Since this typeface isn’t available on Typekit, I purchased a web and desktop license from Fontspring during an end-of-year sale for a reasonable price.
Nouvelle Vague by Anatoletype — No wedding design would be complete without a script typeface. There’s just something about swirly letterforms that screams “wedding!” It’s useful to have one in the design quiver for emphasizing certain information in an elegant way, like a date or venue name. Vintage liquor bottle labels often use script typefaces for information like the founding family name or distillery location, so the style harmonized with our source of inspiration. We chose a quirky script called Nouvelle Vague, which has slightly angular geometry that gives it a more masculine character than other, swoopier scripts. It’s available from Typekit for web use, and I purchased a separate desktop license to supplement that.
Goldenbook by Mark Simonson Studio — A commonly recurring motif in vintage liquor bottle labels (and wedding invitations, for that matter) is a high-contrast serif typeface used for small, all-caps, letter-spaced headings. To fill this role, we chose a typeface called Goldenbook, which is available for both web and desktop use via Typekit.
Adelle and Adelle Sans by TypeTogether — Finally, every content-heavy design needs a workhorse text face. Large blocks of text call for a typeface that’s less quirky and more readable, while still harmonizing well with the overall look. For us, the handsome Adelle Sans fit the bill nicely. We also included its slab-serif sibling Adelle for subheadings, so that the visually heavier Gin typeface could be used more sparsely.
Monogram Seal
A solid foundation of colors and typefaces will get a design 80% of the way there in many cases. To provide that extra 20% push, I decided to design a few visual elements that could be used consistently across mediums to further strengthen our visual brand. The first of these elements was a monogram seal for “Sean & Steve.” (Or is it “Steve & Sean?” Ah, the beauty of sharing the first letter of our first names.)
I started by doing a lot of paper sketches to get an idea of what we liked and didn’t like. I was shooting for something vaguely Deco-ish that also drew inspiration from the beautiful linework of the Sanborn insurance maps. After a few false starts, I settled on a design that divided two S shapes — built from switchbacking lines in a half-circle — with an ampersand in the middle. Drawing a good S is surprisingly difficult! With iteration, I was able to simplify the design down to 3 continuous lines. I scanned my best sketch, brought it into Illustrator, and used the pen tool to trace over the top. Further tweaking in Illustrator produced the final design.
Our seal ended up being an excellent design asset for the wedding. It was an iconic way to unify disparate materials, and in the end it showed up everywhere: on the invitations, projected in light on the dance floor, and even etched onto a few wedding gifts we received from guests!
Geometric Pattern
A second visual element I created was a repeating geometric pattern for use as a subtle background texture. Again, this was based on inspiration from the venue. The Julia Morgan Ballroom has a striking ceiling — wood molding creates a repeating pattern of octogons and circles — and the pattern is carried over to the carpeting as well. I thought that using a simplified version of that pattern in our printed materials would be a great way to subconciously “cheat” on event design, making it seem as though the ceiling and carpet had been designed especially to fit with our event.
Ornamental Geometric Linework
Finally, I drew inspiration from the Sanborn insurance maps to create a set of line-based geometric ornaments that could be used throughout our printed and online materials. I did some sketching on paper, but mostly created the ornaments on-the-fly directly in Illustrator to fit specific empty spaces within designs. I made patterns of concentric circles and overlapping lines with spacing intervals drawn from the Fibonacci sequence. Then I clipped and joined the paths together to create interesting shapes. Initially, I had trouble finding the right level of complexity so that the ornaments would stand out without overwhelming the content. However, once I had a few good ones created, I was able to cut them apart and remix the existing pieces for most new applications without too much additional work.
Putting it all to work
Once I had all of these design elements developed, it became easier and easier to produce new material that fit into our overall aesthetic (be it a thank you note for guest bags, a sign for the venue, or a new web page). Of course, the design system was developed iteratively alongside the individual pieces that made use of it, so the elements that I used for the first “save the date” were a lot less refined than the ones I eventually used for the ceremony programs.
However, because we started with just a few core ideas and then built on top of them, each piece fit together with the next.
I was pleased when guests commented that everything matched so well, but at the end of the day, it was most important that we communicated clearly. Luckily, everybody found their way to the ceremony and had a great time.
Designing an entire wedding turns out to be a lot of work, much of which was new to me. Luckily, I had a lot of great friends to help me. I’m thankful to Christopher Slye, Ben Trissel, Ivan Bettger, and all my former colleagues at Typekit for their help throughout the design process. I’m thankful to our parents for their help and advice on all of the arcane mysteries of wedding planning. And of course, I’m thankful to Steve for being a thoughtful and patient “client,” for giving good feedback — even when I wasn’t always happy to hear it at first — and for marrying me!
In upcoming posts in this series, I’ll go into detail on how I applied the design system we created to specific aspects of the wedding, such as the website, the printed materials, and the event space itself. Follow the collection and check out the other posts in the series that are already published:
