M + M Wedding

I bet you didn’t think planning your own wedding counted as UX design, but what if I told you I created a design system and we sprint planned the whole thing?

Jokes aside, designing the experience of this massive party was my favorite part of planning a wedding. Some people get excited about flowers — I got excited about choosing a typeface (and having it embroidered on the inside of my husband’s suit jacket).

People kept asking what our colors were going to be. I couldn’t really explain to them that they were thinking too small-minded; where they were fixated on colors, I was building an entire design system, and I planned on having EVERYTHING adhere to it.

The system came together slowly, with a decision made here and there. Mostly I let my intuition take over and chose things that felt right — not typically considered a “best practice” in UX design, but then again when else in my life was I actually going to be my user?!

My very first internship ever was at a high-end wedding invitation design studio, so I always knew I’d have to do my own invites. It was super fun to dust off the print design chops, open Illustrator again, and nerd out over paper.

To my now-husband Marc’s dismay, this also meant that I was constantly ordering paper samples, printing out test copies, and asking him which ampersand he preferred.

The save the dates were the first thing I designed and set the tone for everything else. Marc actually ended up being very picky about ampersands, and we settled on Whitney (still one of my all time favorite typefaces) because it was clean but still had some character.

The little logo is a princess tiara and a cowboy hat, a nod to the sort of ridiculous nicknames we’ve given each other (cowboy and princess). My brother in law has also dubbed himself the astronaut but unfortunately he didn’t make the logo. 😉

With the system in place, all the other print, digital, and physical pieces came together quite nicely. I was most excited about the coasters, which doubled as our party favors (the wedding party got the black leather ones).

Not pictured because in the blur leading up to the wedding I did not document them well: custom Snapchat filters, wedding programs, table numbers, menus, seating charts…

If you’ve planned a wedding, you know that there are about five bazillion other decisions about the experience that have to get made — what will we eat? who will sit next to each other? what time will everything happen?

I could go on and on but instead I’ll just share our guiding principle, which was to throw a damn good party. I think we succeeded. Plus, we’re still married so I’ll call this project a major success.

Top photo and bottom two photos: Halee Rene Photography

For more photos, see this blog post