This mission was to create a contemporary and elegant, yet casual invitation design to an 80th birthday celebration. The client supplied several photos from the birthday boy’s life, and we went to work!

The Concept

The first thing we did was to layout the text and photos; we then chose typefaces — Clarendon because it’s a casual, easy-to-read serif face. We offset that with Bickham Script and used some of the alternate characters from that face for additional scripty flair!

Rather than go with a traditional all-centered layout for the text, we staggered two flush left copy blocks … for a contemporary treatment. We chose a soft teal and dark brown for the colors as that’s a very fresh color combo.

And somewhere in the interim whirl of colors and typefaces, we created that stellar 80! icon. No, it’s not clip art. We designed it from scratch just for this project — that little twist of the unexpected. We used Filosofia typeface for its clean and friendly characteristics.