Color Palette and Aeshetics

Hmmm....the Save-the-Date poll is returning different results than I expected. I thought the winner would be the magnet by itself, but I suppose it's hard to judge when I've never actually shown you the magnet design. Thanks to everyone who has voted so far!

The coco + kelley blog has been around for a while, but I just recently became a regular reader. One of the neat things about this blog is how she uses interior decorating/design as a spring board to talk about other, related topics, like weddings and fashion. Today, she featured a room by Erinn Valencich demonstrating the Pantone Fall 2009 Fashion Color Report.



And wouldn't you know it, it's pretty similar to our color scheme. For the longest time I had my heart set on a cheery, whimsical (ahem) palette of blue and orange. Not exactly fall like, and while Tom has one of the wickedest senses of humor around, I suspect he wanted a more grown-up wedding than whimsical one. I found this beautiful inspiration board on Snippet & Ink featuring my all-time favorite color (yellow), and my all-time (cannot stress this one enough) favorite outfit ever on the sublime Michelle Williams.


Tom, of course, loved the board and showed it to our wedding website designer (the "WWD") who took the visual and ran with it. Here's a small screen shot of our webiste:


The bottles came about as a nod to my doctor-ness and Tom's scientist-ness, but also because we are getting married in an antiques warehouse where we thought the idea of apothecary bottle collections would make sense. I also wanted to reference the feel of a 19th century British naturalist's home laboratory (yes, I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on 19th century British naturalists, what a *cute* nerd). The idea was to have "specimens" throughout the space - small groupings of flowers (even single stems) in small glasses like a naturalist would use for their sketches and studies, table cards that were displayed like butterflies in specimen boxes, cloches with weird vignettes. But then the WWD designed a website that had a more modern sensibility than the nineteenth century, more like a 1920s vibe with a hint of spiritualist/sceance. The color palette is also entirely too dark for a naturalist theme, which I picture as all clear glass, white, sage green, and brown.

Honestly, I'm at a loss as to how to work the visual aesthetic now, as it is entirely too refined and elegant for me, the person who loves to think about pinwheels, melon balls, and knitting. But it'll work. We're keeping with the whole apothecary theme, which will influence the font and lettering on the website and stationery. And the new color scheme is why I switched the Save the Date cards to sepia toned photographs, to echo the brown color and the vintage tone.

Okay, this post is entirely too long and, frankly, self-involved. But it is nice to think about the wedding on days like today when everyone who could took a shot at correcting me for little things, like how I tie my shoelaces. Surgery is honestly the only field in which you can be reprimanded for being helpful. Life is beautiful.