The Life Aquatic Inspired Invitations.

I’ve had the chance to befriend a lot of talented people thanks to this blog, one of which has been fellow OKC-dweller Kathleen Shannon. And, well, she’s amazing. Both as a designer and as a friend. (See that Design Crush logo up there? Yeah, she did it.) We happen to share a love of Wes Anderson movies, so when I heard she was designing a wedding invitation inspired by The Life Aquatic I started salivating at the idea. She’s lovely enough to allow me to share it with you first, right here right now. And because no one describes their work better than the artist, I give you the story behind the invitation suite in Kathleen’s own words.

Vanessa contacted me for custom wedding invitations after she stumbled across my portfolio on my blog. She and her fiance George met in Iraq working for the Department of State and love traveling. They are huge Wes Anderson fans, love maps, and giant squids. Sounds odd and quirky – so of course it was right up my alley. They had lots of fun requests – along with a giant squid on the invite they also wanted to include pi (you know, mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space), Par Avion written in Persian somewhere, and a map with important places to the couple highlighted. It’s not everyday you get requests like this from a bride and I was more than happy to oblige. Overall, Vanessa and George wanted the invite to spark a bit of curiosity in its recipients and I was up for the design challenge.

The Life Aquatic is one of my favorite movies of all time so I used that as my primary source of inspiration. I wanted the invitation typography to feel like opening credits and the RSVP tag to feel like a baggage claim tag. We utilized a limited color-palette of emerald and aqua with a few pops of orange. I managed to include all the requested elements without making the suite feel too cluttered – I think what we came away with was a layered and positively curious collection.

PS: To see more of Kathleen’s invitation work check out her site!