Invites are mailed

It's been a long time since I updated. I've been working 15 hour days and trying to design my invitations. If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have used a boxed it. They are pretty cute these days.

It first started with a free template I found on the Wedding Chicks website. The template had a yellow dahlia graphic and I wanted to edit the graphic to match my colors. I googled how to extract the graphic out of the PDF template and then I used Photoshop to edit the colors. I don't actually know how to use Photoshop.

After I edited the colors and did the layout for the invites, I found out that Photoshop is not the program to use for designing an invitation because it rasterizes (?) graphics. I needed to use either Illustrator or InDesign. After talking to a few people in our Communications department, I decided that I needed to "learn" the programs. Many of my coworkers offered to help me and said they would even put it together for me because they didn't want me to run out and buy the programs.

I knew that my invites would be too time consuming to ask my coworkers to do so I ran out and bought a 6 month old iMac from a graphic designer and he left Adobe CS5 installed on the computer. I had to "learn" how to use the programs in a weekend.

I edited the graphic in Illustrator and then used InDesign to do the layout and typography. This led to learning about vectors, paths, glyphs...I then had to get everything printed. At first I was planning on sending them to smartpress.com but my copier/printer rep offered to print them for me. I went out to Xpedx and bought paper. Somehow I ended up with a new color laser printer and printing them myself. I considered cutting them myself but I got smart and took them to get cut at OfficeMax.

These invitations took forever to do but they are finally done. I'll add more details later. I'm really tired of invitations right now.