Vintage Styling, Colours and Fonts

Clas­sic vin­tage styling by Sam from SWY Wed­ding design and color ideas

This image shows a lot of clas­sic visual styling.  These are ele­ments such as vin­tage style china, like tea cups and tea pots.  There’s a cake that’s per­fect for teatime (not some­thing that hap­pens a lot these days), sil­ver­ware and a beau­ti­ful selec­tion of pas­tel shade flow­ers fea­tur­ing numer­ous roses of var­i­ous shades.  Roses are a really clas­sic and tra­di­tional flower.  There’s also a cham­pagne flute which is not really that vin­tage but I don’t think there’s many wed­dings they don’t fit in with!  That straw­berry looks pretty deli­cious too.  The photo shows off the hand­i­work of my friend Sam who is a wed­ding plan­ner at SWY Wed­ding designs.  The pho­tos are by Burns Rowatt Pho­tog­ra­phy a pho­tog­ra­pher based in the NE of England.

Colours

Colour wise vin­tage I think can go two ways.  You either like things which appear aged and so colours are desat­u­rated, they look a bit faded — like an item made a long time ago which has lost its orig­i­nal look — or you like vin­tage style items but you’re not so wor­ried about the aged or worn look, in which case you can use bright or pas­tel colours or any other style as you see fit I think!

I recently did a post and Claire was kind enough to share on how to find colour inspi­ra­tion for your wed­ding.  In part of it I talked about how images can be used to pro­vide color ideas.  So I thought it would be good to look at some of the colours here. Take the colours from any indi­vid­ual item in the photo and if you think it looks good chances are the colours work really well together.  Just look at the tea cup and plate as an example.

You can also take colours from a photo as a whole as has been done with this image.  The colours to the right are slightly bright­ened as often the color you see in your head is heav­ily depen­dent on the colours around it and its con­text.  E.g. the blue seems brighter as it’s by white and your mind knows it’s not in direct light.

Fonts

When it comes to fonts there are some really great ones out there.  I’ve put a few exam­ples below and you can see even more on my blog — vin­tage fonts or the orig­i­nal post about fonts on this very blog.  There’s quite a vari­ety and I think the main thing is to avoid sans serif fonts (like arial) and script fonts.  Script fonts can include nat­ural hand writ­ing styles.  Peo­ple would have been writ­ing then but it’s harder to asso­ciate that type of font with a spe­cific time (at least for vintage).

I sug­gest you just think about tra­di­tional signs, you can prob­a­bly see exam­ples in your High Street with shops that have been around a long time and play on that history.

Exam­ples of fonts for use with bespoke wed­ding invitations

Exam­ples

To wrap things up I’ve taken Sienna – a flo­ral design from my web­site and changed the colours to use the reds, pink and orange as fea­tured above.  I’ve also used some of the vin­tage fonts as an exam­ple of how our bespoke wed­ding sta­tionery can be changed to suit a style.

Sienna exam­ple using vin­tage fonts and colours men­tioned in this post

This image hasn’t shrunk bril­liantly so if you would like to see it closer to its full glory you can see it on my wed­ding sta­tionery blog.  Sorry I don’t know how to put a larger ver­sion on this site!  It’s not mine so I don’t want to break it. [Haha — thanks Nathan! Claire]

If you would like to see more bespoke sta­tionery and wed­ding invi­ta­tions includ­ing vin­tage please visit my main site.  There is a fair amount of infor­ma­tion on my wed­ding sta­tionery blog includ­ing numer­ous color exam­ples.  Two of my favourites are a photo of Lon­don from Prim­rose Hill and another of a tele­scope in Hawaii.  There’s a fair few posts on fonts too as well as advice on word­ing for wed­ding invi­ta­tions and sta­tionery.