Anyone who knows me or who follows me knows that i am currently engaged to be married later this year. Those of you who have been married before know just how expensive a wedding can be. Luckily there are ways to save some green when planning a wedding and in the case of this post, why not use Photoshop?
The Web Site
First thing’s first, you gotta have a wedding website. The first wedding planning activity I did was to create johnandmandywedding.com. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is where I started using Photoshop to start saving money. I started with a very basic design using a picture of my bride to be and I out in front of the water in Charleston SC. I ended up using the site as a place for people to RSVP to the wedding, request songs, view a registry, and post information so that our guest have an easy access forum to know what’s going on. I highly recommend that anyone getting married take a little time to create a site for the wedding and you’ll be surprised at how many different ways you can use it to keep people up to date.
The Invitations
The next place I used Photoshop to save a little money was with the wedding invites. Now, I didn’t do the initial design, but I wish I had. The design was pretty simple to follow, and I used it as a jump off point to design the response cards. You can see where I pulled some of the design elements from the invite design. Notice the initial design below:
I basically took the artwork from the original design as incorporated into my own response cards. My fiance had bought a pack of 50 response cards from Michael’s and I developed a design around the size and shape of the cards. Take a look at the resulting design below:
You’ll notice the darker border around the center of the card. This was an indented part of the card which I desired to design against. It was easy enough to enter in the dimensions of the card to start my Photoshop design and then measure the indented area to incorporate into the response card design.
I decided to make that same design work for me once again on my website as I designed an RSVP button for the site. You’ll see the similar flower patters from the originally purchased design reused once again on the button. 
The Menu
The menu was kind of a fun one. Here the caterer, The Red Sky Cafe sent me an official Word doc containing the menu as we made our food choices. Instead of getting someone else to design it to make it look good and print it out, again, I turned to Photoshop. In a matter of a couple of hours I had nice layout with 2 alternate designs. Both of which incorporate a floral patter similar to the on that came on the purchased design of the wedding invitations.
I got the idea for this first menu design by looking at some examples on line:
Then I accidentally got the second design by playing with Photoshop’s Transform feature when copying and pasting one image into my design. It was large and covered the entrie design, but I decided to throw it in the background and drop the opacity and …
Now the examples above are pretty plain and without color. However, this was intentional as my Fiance had found some specific paper she wanted to print them on. So keeping that in mind when I designed it, you can see how it all came together. The below image is actually a scanned version of the final product printed out on paper:
The Conclusion
As you can see, with a little time, effort, and creativity, you can wind up saving a chunk of change by DYI. If you have any questions about any of the design elements I’ve done, please feel free to ask away.
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