Not Vintage but Modern Stationery — Pt 1

There has been a lot of shabby chic, a lot of vin­tage (both aged and pris­tine or replica) recently.  Most peo­ple only have one wed­ding so it’s highly unlikely you had another vin­tage wed­ding last year. That said it may not be to your taste or if you have a close group of friends you may have seen more tea cups or bird cages at everyone’s wed­dings than you want to.  So this arti­cle is to look at what I con­sider a polar oppo­site for those pon­der­ing not going vin­tage. This will be from a sta­tionery per­spec­tive since that is what I do!  See what bespoke sta­tionery I can make here.  So wel­come to my post on mod­ern sta­tionery and other alter­na­tives to vin­tage and shabby chic.

Mod­ern, shapes and geometry

We get into shapes at an early age.  From build­ing blocks to fit the shape through the hole I find some­thing reas­sur­ing about tri­an­gles and squares. They can also be very mod­ern, free of all that clas­si­cal or vin­tage fussiness.

I have to be hon­est, I’m not sure I’m one for much mod­ern art.  I do like the look of some of it but strug­gle to see the value jus­ti­fied.  The name of the cre­ator almost becomes more impor­tant than what has been cre­ated.  It might also be because for art home­work at school I had to do some­thing in a mod­ern style.  I chose do some­thing like the work of Piet Mon­drian.  It got marked an A and the teacher in giv­ing it back to me asked me what the inspi­ra­tion was behind it.  When I said I arranged it so it looked pleas­ing to the eye she crossed the A out and put a C in its place.

A mean­ing if you need one

The designs you’re about to see were made with the inten­tion of mak­ing sta­tionery that could look great and be per­son­alised in any num­ber of ways (like all our sta­tionery). Although if — like my art teacher — you do want a mean­ing behind your wed­ding invi­ta­tion design, then this is reflec­tive of the uni­verse, in that geom­e­try is very math­e­mat­i­cal and maths is the lan­guage of the uni­verse. And if you break the uni­verse down to its small­est com­po­nents it’s all dig­i­tal, 1’s and 0’s.  (I think they call it binary

Is vin­tage old hat?

I don’t dis­like vin­tage at all and I think if you love it go with it.  A lot of my work fits that cat­e­gory quite well includ­ing my best sell­ing range Tri­este.  I’m also a big fan of art deco which is often seen as falling under the vin­tage ban­ner.  You can read up on Art Deco arti­cles on this blog, back­ground on Art Deco here and Art Deco wed­ding sta­tionery ideas here.

So let’s go circular

Over­lap­ping cir­cles — fish scale design

First I’ve gone with cir­cles.  This has been fea­tured on my wed­ding sta­tionery blog AS Invites in an arti­cle on Ombre sta­tionery.  This design I’ve over­lapped in a fish scale style.  The illus­tra­tion above shows how the cir­cles are arranged.  This makes the invi­ta­tion design work well with the Ombre style as it has a bit more com­plex­ity than a basic colour gradient.

Fish Scale Ombre Invi­ta­tion design

Cir­cles don’t have to imi­tate fish scales though and the fol­low­ing design works by over­lap­ping dif­fer­ent lay­ers of cir­cles.  I must admit that this one went a lit­tle retro, though for the sake of this arti­cle retro is def­i­nitely not vintage!

Retro Geo­met­ric Cir­cles Wed­ding Invitation

This was cre­ated for this blog post though I expect there’s sim­i­lar designs out there as it’s not the most com­pli­cated design in the world.

A square design

I like this square based idea, it reminds me of com­puter pix­els which is kind of futur­is­tic and retro all in one go.  This style lets you go from one colour to another which is good if you have two colours in your wed­ding styling and espe­cially good if one colour is rep­re­sent­ing each per­son.  This design could also be used with more spo­radic colours rather than mov­ing from one to another.

square pixel wed­ding invite

This was based on a title I did for a yel­low and grey inspired post on my own wed­ding sta­tionery blog.

We’re going to take a break at this point from our look at mod­ern sta­tionery.  If Claire the great and pow­er­ful ruler of Eng­lish Wed­ding Blog land [haha Nathan — nice touch! — C x] allows me I’ll be back with some more ideas shortly.  I know thou­sands of peo­ple will be on the edge of their seats in antic­i­pa­tion now!  None of these designs are cur­rently listed on the Artemis Sta­tionery web­site.  If you like what you see here and in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle they could eas­ily be used with any of the types of bespoke sta­tionery and invi­ta­tions made by Artemis Sta­tionery.  I expect one or more will be up on the web­site once it’s been re-launched.

To con­tact me visit my con­tact page on Artemis Sta­tionery or leave a mes­sage here.  I’d love to know what other ideas peo­ple have in avoid­ing vin­tage or even how peo­ple are doing some­thing new with vintage.