Minimalist wedding with hand-drawn graphics

Port Phillip Estate wedding

for Vanessa + Samuel

Words by Stevie-Rae
Photography by Motta Weddings

Vanessa and Samuel got in touch early in their wedding planning process. They loved our signature Good Day style but their venue didn’t require any furniture or styling (total dream spot!). What to do? Get us on board to create custom graphic design for weddings!

What we do is always personalised, memorable graphic design, to inject a chunky bunch of the couple’s personalities into their wedding reception. In this blog, we’ll walk you through how we do custom graphic design for weddings, for ace couples like Vanessa + Samuel.

The brief

Port Phillip Estate is a stunning and classic winery venue on the Mornington Peninsula. Vanessa and Samuel told me there’d be traditional Chinese elements such as red table florals, Chinese gate crashing games and a beautiful tea ceremony.

While the couple weren’t exactly sure what they wanted for their event signage, they described themselves as loving a minimalist aesthetic but with a twist, of course: “Because sometimes I get bored of it!” according to Vanessa.

Vanessa and Samuel love camping, adventuring and hotpot! Vanessa wanted to include their cute little toy poodle x Pomeranian and Samuel loves fishing, so he wanted fish to play a big roll in the design.

 

Getting started

This is how we do it. La, la la la, oh.

What better way to match up people’s verbal graphic design brief than with a visual brief! So, I had V+S create a Pinterest board of things that they were visually drawn to; fonts, colours, illustrations, florals, architecture, anything! Custom graphic design for weddings clients all do this step and it’s a lot of fun.

We don’t like to limit these boards to just other graphic designs (or snippets of weddings only) because we want to get to know the couple on a deeper level, find out what they love and what makes their hearts sing.

Reviewing Pinterest boards is one of our fave things. Here’s a few images I pulled from Vanessa’s board to start the concept process. As you will see, it’s a mix of their own images (invitation, custom neon with RAD wedding hashtag) and other people’s.

 

Creating a concept

Possibly THE most important step of all the steps ever ever. Ever

Combining our fun chats with the couple, plus their wants/needs/desires and dreams, I started putting together my own mood board slash concept as part of their custom graphic design. 

The concept is such a crucial step in the graphic design process, because it ensures we’re all on the same page, and gives us a reference point for everything going forward. It’s a blueprint for the design. It’s a design site map. It’s a direction. It’s just really very important.  

Minimalist, unique, fun + so them!

The concept landed on a clean black and white palette with a nod to their Chinese heritage with pops of red.

Vanessa and Sam loved the concept, with their only feedback being that the original red was a little too bright, so we swapped it out for this deeper red and then it was perfect!

I had Samuel send me a list of all his favourite fish and I started compiling all my reference images for the hand drawn illustrations I was about to create.

Minimalist designs for review

I created their designs with placeholders for the finer details, they signed them off and then we put them on ice until about 6 weeks prior to their wedding date.

Completing the process includes collecting guest names, final food and drinks menus, making any final design tweaks, getting all that info into the existing designs and doing one more proofread/spell-check.

You can have a look at the final designs below.

Making them real-life printed designs ready for action!

Once the couple were 100% happy, the files were prepared for print (kinda boring but important), sent to print (vital), collected and inspected to ensure everything is schmick AF (the most vital-est) and exclaimed over by us for about 97 minutes about how radical they’d turned out.

Vanessa came in to collect her event signage a few days before their wedding. This is hands down the best part every time – getting to chat to our rad clients in the lead up to their weddings – one of the best times in their lives – seeing their reactions, hearing how everything is coming together and often, telling them it’s all going to be rad when they’re a bit stressed out. Vanessa was cool as a cucumber and didn’t need any Wedding Week Counselling ™ and we were all pumped to send her off with her radical event signage.

Their custom graphic design

Welcome sign 

Seating chart + place cards

Our take on legendary Parks + Rec saying ‘Treat Yo’Self’.

Tip: You don’t have to use boring old numbers for your tables. Unless you’re a mathematician and the numbers one to 10 are somehow special to you, you can really do whatever you like! Birds, fish, places you’ve been together, puns, in-jokes, hair dos, whatever!

An excellent creator of the all-important personalisation AND a dash of fun for your guests.

 

Table Numbers

or should we say Table Fish ?‍♀️

 

Menus

A5 menus for the tables because who doesn’t want to know what’s to eat at a delightful eatery like Port Phillip Estate? We created these with actual drawings of the actual foods and drinks on offer. Genius? We obviously think so.

 

Guest Book sign

The couple’s toy poodle x Pomeranian features it’s unbelievably cute face on their sign directing people to have some fun in the photo booth and write a great message in their guest book.

 

Event signage IRL

Feast your eyes on these beautiful photos of Vanessa and Sam’s wedding by the amazing Motta Weddings. The standout florals are from Poppy Culture HQ.

As you can see, the designs have oodles of punch, while complimenting the beautiful venue. They bring in the couple’s personality, letting guests know a fun time shall be had, but without being too in your face.

Incorporating the table stationery into the existing table elements of the tables is one of our favourite things to do. It means one less thing on the tables (ie, standalone table number holder) which is great as wedding tables can get very fun and feel really squishy for your guests. Popping the table numbers into the flowers looks delightful! 

WANT CUSTOM GRAPHIC DESIGN AT YOUR EVENT?

Yes? Cool, head over to our custom graphic design page now ???. Maybe? Still go have a look and see if it floats your boat. No thanks? Why have you gotten this far then?

Thanks for having us at your delightful wedding Vanessa + Samuel. Congratulations and may your life together be filled to the brim with love, whiskey, cute dogs, great conversation and heaps of laughs. Second congrats too on getting to have your wedding a literal bee’s dick before weddings got cancelled thanks to #RonaPostponer.

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