Photoshop vs. Reality: Wedding Inspiration Mock Ups

A little over a year ago (yikes, I'm such an old bee now!) I wrote a blog post about how much I love to mock things up in Photoshop or Illustrator. I've never been very good at just imagining or hand sketching things, but I like having a clearly laid out vision before I bring a project to life. It really saves on the cost of materials for projects too, since there isn't as much need to experiment.

I also said in that old blog post that it would be fun to come back after my wedding to compare my early Photoshop mocked up inspirations with the final result. So let's take a look back at a few of the many, many mock ups I created early in my wedding planning stages!

Invitations

I'd initially had another design for our invites, but it was too complicated and was more DIY time than we could handle. So I mocked up a scaled down version of our invitation suite.

And the final product. Other than some rounded corners, these came out pretty dang close to my mock up! Not only did doing a mock up really help me nail down exactly what elements I wanted to include, but it also gave me a great start on the content for the inserts that I printed.
Our Ceremony Set Up

We loved the ceremony site at our venue, the trees, the meadow, the bay view, it had a lot of natural beauty, that only needed a little decor. But when you're working with a big empty meadow, you've got to use some imagination. Or some Photoshop! Originally I had wanted us to build an arch that was bigger than the one provided by our venue, and had wanted an aisle runner, so my heels wouldn't sink into the grass.

However, after being lied to by the vendor who I was going to rent chargers and the aisle runner from, I decided on just using rose petals on the aisle. And Mr. Cola convinced me that it would be too much work to transport or assemble a DIY arch, so we ended up just decorating the arch the venue already had. The final result was beautiful though, even if not exactly like my original idea!

(By Shoot Me Now Photography)

(By Shoot Me Now Photography)

Card Box

This was an easy one....and probably it wasn't necessary to do a mock up of a card box. But I did it back when it was too early to actually start working on wedding things, very early in the planning stages, and it turned out almost exactly like my Photoshopped version.

(By Shoot Me Now Photography)

Table Decor and Centerpieces

These mock ups ended up only becoming a partial reality. First, as I'd already mentioned, a vendor lied to us about having purple charger plates available, so we didn't end up getting to use them as I'd planned to add color to our tables.
I was really frustrated at the time, but ended up really happy with the end result. Instead of chargers, I went about $150 over budget and rented overlays for the tables. They still gave me the pops of color I was looking for, without the headache of trying to DIY my own chargers.

As for the centerpieces, I'd say we did pretty good with sticking to my inspiration mock ups. We ended up using some different flowers, but that was expected, since we were at the mercy of whatever was available at the flower market.

The tall centerpieces:

(By Shoot Me Now Photography)

Short centerpieces:

(By Shoot Me Now Photography)

Cocktail table centerpieces:

(By Shoot Me Now Photography)

Rehearsal Dinner Decor

This was one area of planning that I needed a lot of inspiration for. There were no pictures online that I could find of our rehearsal dinner venue actually set up for a dinner. So when we visited the location, I took pictures, which I later Photoshopped chairs, tables and decor onto. My sister was so amazed at how close everything turned out to my mock ups that she pulled up my original blog post on her phone during the rehearsal dinner to show the rest of our wedding party the mock ups for comparison!

The mock ups:

The reality:

The Inspiration Board

And finally, just for fun, and because I've seen a few other bees do it, how about a look at my first inspiration board, compared to what details really happened. I made this first inspiration board to use as my personal blog header, in August 2009 (you can click on these boards for a larger view if you like).

And here are the same details from our wedding (Sorry, when downsizing this board from over 800 MB, it muted the colors a little, but you get the idea!):

(Except the favor boxes, all photos in this board are by Shoot Me Now Photography, cropped by me)

Have you used any graphic design programs to help you solidify your vision for your wedding? And is anyone else as big of a fan of mock ups as I am? :)

(Unless otherwise noted, all photos in this post are personal photos, taken by myself or our guests, and all editing was done by me.)

PhotoShop Goodness!

Alright, I admit it, I'm a PhotoShop dork. I taught myself how to use it about 5 years ago for a job, and have been obsessed ever since! It really helps me visualize my projects to lay them out in two dimensions, and will (hopefully!) serve as a blueprint for my DOC (when I pick one) to set up everything as I envision. I will be doing real life mock ups of most of these, which I will share with you over the next few months, but in the meantime I wanted to show you all some of my PhotoShop designs, to give you a little preview of what to expect. (I know, I'm such a tease!)

Sample invitations suite mock up (note, some of this will be changing, but gives you a good idea of my color scheme. I will definitely be using the stylized flower and vine with flowers motif throughout):
A closer look at our STD magnets, which will accompany our insanely excessive STD cards (more on those later!):

A mock up of potential program design:
Place cards mock up:

I even PhotoShopped on the floor plan on TMT's website, where I want everything to go:

And then I PhotoShopped furniture and an arch similar to what we'll be building onto a picture of TMT's ceremony location (don'tcha just love the view of the bay through the trees?):

Next up, a mock up of the dining tables looking down. I did this all to scale, with 60" tables and 13" chargers, to make sure the beautiful purple glass chargers I found would be worth the 88 mile drive to Sonoma to rent (my mom was very concerned the table would look to crowded, what do you think?):A close up of a single place setting & swatches:
And of course I had to do side views of the tables, so I could visualize the centerpieces (note, I did these before discovering the lovely purple chargers above). Here is the tall centerpiece:
And the short centerpiece:And the centerpiece for the cocktail tables:Next up, my four tier card box:
And also favors mocked up (but we might be changing these to something else....):
And signage, lots of signage! These will be the buffet signs:


This is the sign that will explain our untraditional Wishing Stone guest book:


And this is a mock up of the Gift Table/Guest Book Table:

I also made cute bathroom door signs, to cover the ugly signs they currently have on the doors:


And then there was the matter of our crazy 6' tall cupcake stand that Mr. Cola will be making. I of course had to make sure 100 regular sized cupcakes and 200 mini cupcakes would fit on our stand, allowing for room at the corners of each shelf for flowers. Each big square below is a shelf of the cupcake stand, and circles are the cupcakes. Yep, they all will fit! (and no, I don't expect our baker to set them up EXACTLY this way, but they'll get the idea from this to stagger regular ones with minis):


And finally, I couldn't leave you without a peak at what I've mocked up for our rehearsal dinner. Since we're doing a casual BBQ in the park for all our family and out of town guests, I'm going with a Paisley Picnic theme. Here are the buffet signs:


The place card and sign explaining seats aren't assigned, but we're using place cards so everyone can learn each other's names:

And a birds-eye view of the rehearsal dinner picnic tables all decked out (but I'm thinking maybe using metal pails instead of the boot center pieces. And there will definitely be citronella candles!)Well, that's about it for now! Next step, start implementing these designs (and so many more that I haven't shared!) into real life mock ups and then the final products. I think it will be so interesting to look back at this post over the coming months, to see how many of these mock ups actually evolve into real elements of our wedding, and how many morph into something different.

Did you feel the need to PhotoShop mock ups of your wedding creations before implementing them in real life?