This is kinda Part Two of my wedding invitation post, where I showed you how we made cool concert ticket-style invitations here. Along with sending the concert tickets to our invited guests we included an 8x11 concert poster to really set the casual, fun and musical vibes planned for our backyard wedding. They were a hit! If you wanna make something like this, it is super easy and fun! So let's dive in :)
The first thing we had to do was figure out what kind of picture or image we wanted for the concert style poster. We came up with the idea of having a picture of the two of us pretending like we were in a cool indie band. Are we in a band? No. Do we even sing or play music very well? Nope. But we love music, going to concerts, and are becoming quite the vinyl collectors, so we have some research down ;)
Obviously you could hire a photographer who might have done your engagement photos, and I can imagine that would be a fantastic experience and result. We are pretty DIY and wanted to save some money where we could, so we set my phone camera with the verbal timer, propped it up on our outdoor bar height table facing our home's brick and ivy covered wall, and snapped away. We gathered our sunglasses, hats, and jackets for some varied looks, and then just tried to get into it. Sure we felt kinda silly, and if the neighbours saw us they were probably laughing at us, but we ended up having a blast together! It was fun and were just really excited to get started on what would be part of our creative wedding invitation!
Here are a few of the coolio outtakes for your amusement ;)
Next step going through your photo shoot together was also fun and pretty funny. After narrowing it down to a few faves, we picked the one. For the theme the idea is trying to be a cool indie band, so the one that had the most apathetic hipness and showed off some of my hubby's cool tat seemed to fit the best, haha!
Now the question is, what do you do with your photo to turn it into a concert poster? Well you gotta love the internet! I found an easy to use and fantastic poster maker site postermywall.com with tons of designs and templates for every kind of poster, flyer, digital signage, banners and even videos! They have so many template categories to choose from; Events, Concerts, Business, Real Estate, Restaurants, Corporate, and Retail to name a few.
Here are a few screenshots to see a glimpse into the site and what they have available:
BONUS: They do also have a specific wedding category with lots of save the date templates, bridal shower, invitations, welcome signage and more. So if you need some traditional DIY wedding printables they are a great resource tool for ready-made and customizable designs!
Speaking of designs...there are SO MANY FREAKING designs to choose from! As a designer I know it is easy for people to get overwhelmed with all of the choices available. Clients ask me all the time how I narrow down choices so you don't walk into a showroom and drop into the fetal position, or search online and pull your hair out.
Designer Tip:
Avoid choice overwhelm! Before you even start searching for anything, get as clear as you can and narrow down some important parameters. Focus your searching and shopping with those key points in mind, so you can be efficient, have fun, and say goodbye to option overload!
Using an interior design example (well cause that's what I do and think about), let's say you need a new chair for your Living Room. Do you have specific stores or online sites you want to buy from? Do you have a budget range? Take into consideration size: are you looking for a chair and a half, a large chair for lounging with your feet curled up, regular, or a small accent chair for occasional use? Are you envisioning a specific style: wingback, club style, wood frame or fully upholstered, traditional, modern, or farmhouse? What features may be important to you - recliner, swivel, tall back, leather or customizing fabric selection? And of course you may have an idea of colour and finishes.
If you don't have every detail worked out that's OK! If your parameters are too narrow that can be frustrating too because you may not find enough options. Just having a thought out concept helps reduce the number of choices, and will make you more confident and able to enjoy the process!
So in the case of searching the multitude of graphic designs for your wedding concert poster follow the same steps. If you browse by design size 'Poster' in our case, it will automatically filter out smaller files, and then you can choose a sub-category that is the overall vibe you are going for. On Postermywall there are lots of concert sub-categories such as Acoustic, Rock, Vintage, Jazz, Indie, and more. So I looked at the Vintage and Indie categories. We knew we wanted to include our photo so I looked for ones that had a design with a photo...that narrows down your choices greatly. Our other thoughts were that it would have cool looking text and a simple but not plain background. And then we just made sure we didn't search endlessly before picking one we both liked. We could have easily spent weeks selecting a design, let alone customizing it, but we needed to get them done and sent off in the mail!
This is the original design we chose to customize and make it our own :)
Postermywall's site makes it easy to sign up, load your photo, and edit the design. Taking the basic information from our concert ticket-style wedding invitations (shown in the photo below) we played around with the layout, colours and a cool text colour effect until it we were happy with the result. And once we saw it all together it made us feel like maybe we were in a cool Indie band after all! :)
We designed it entirely on my phone for whatever reason, and I must admit it was a bit finicky when it came to small adjustments moving text around slightly and angling the photo and tape bits. When I use this site again (which I most definitely will) I will make sure I edit using my laptop instead of getting slightly frustrated trying to do graphic design on my phone. So learn from my experience friends, and design it on a tablet or laptop if you can :)
An easy step of choosing your format size and save as PDF, pay the small charge of $8.99 US and it's downloaded and it's ready for your print shop or home printer. We went to our local Staples and the helpful clerk at the printing department helped us select a heavier weight card stock for our 8x11 concert style poster invitations. I am pretty certain we chose a 100 lb cover stock. We wanted to make sure it was thick enough to mail and display without curling or getting damaged.
While we were at it, we also printed up a couple in a larger poster size for wedding signage, but with the idea that we would frame it afterwards. We adjusted the text colour to suit our lower hall decor, so it could then become a cool and different memento from our wedding.
Note: If you want to edit your downloaded design you will need to pay the cost of the file download again. I adjusted the accent text colours and downloaded it in a poster size format. It is still very inexpensive for what you are getting!
We bought a Michaels stock size poster frame with mat, and using our email list coupon got it for 40% off. Score again!
We put it in our lower hall, which is still in progress of being finished. While the space is only 75% done we have decorated around the unfinished bits and hung up a couple of concert posters we already had. They both happened to be black, white, and red, so that is why we changed the text colour on our wedding poster to red.
We've decided as we go to more shows we will collect our fave posters and add them to our now 'concert poster hallway', and among them will be our pretend wedding one! :) How fun is that?
And here is our Lower Hall in its partially finished glory! This is real people. I thought I would share a peek that a designers home isn't all perfect, and we can be famous for having too many home projects on the go.
You can see that the ceiling for reasons I don't even remember, still needs to be primed and painted. I honestly stopped seeing it! It is amazing what we get used to and don't really see after a while :( I also have some patching and touch up painting to do on the walls, the stair runner and handrail need to be installed on the lower flight, and we need a door solution to the Ikea curtains on adjustable shower rods covering the two closet openings on the right.
So if you just ignore those things it looks pretty good. I must admit that photographing it and talking about it gives me the push to finally get it done this winter! So that's a good thing, right? You can see that it will look pretty cool when it is all done!
Here's to our killer concert style wedding poster, that was an awesome addition to our wedding invitations, but now to our home decor to remind us of not only our beautiful wedding, but all of the fun we had planning it together!
And also apparently to future posts on the continued progress and completion of our Lower Hall! Cheers!
Your Designer and ModernBoho Mom,
Ramee
xo
P.S. If you give this a try please share with me! And I would love to hear your comments :)