One of my sisterly duties in Sister2's upcoming nuptials is to organize the bachelorette party. Sister2 is going pretty non-traditional: emailing Save the Dates, and skipping a lot of the additional parties that seem to cling onto weddings like a parasite, demanding ever more money, attention, and gifts. (Whaaat? I love giving people gifts for their engagement party, bridal shower, bachelorette party, AND wedding all in a row. Traditions are awesome.)
Anyway, I approve heartily, as you may have guessed, and the slimming down of the festivities allows Sister3 and me to do what we do best: go all out. Rather than having 3 pre-wedding parties, we'll just have one really good one. Which, of course, means we have to go to New Orleans for a weekend.
We've got all kinds of ideas and are super excited about planning this trip, but it's still almost a year off, so the only thing we really had to lock down was the bridal party's availability. In order to do that, we made a Facebook event with dates and ideas, and we'll fill stuff in as we go.
The Project
To (finally) get to the point: a graphic designer can never simply create a Facebook Event. There must be an appropriate event cover image to set the tone and clearly communicate what the event is.
The Process
Graphics
For once I dove straight into graphics without bothering to ponder fonts and colors. I'd made this image for a friend's bachelorette party about a year ago (and I really love it!).
So I opened up this file and everything faintly bachelorette related (Btw, spellcheck does not recognize "bachelorette" and keeps wanting to correct it to "bachelor." Spellcheck, do you know what sexism is?). I actually almost copped out entirely because I like this image enough to reuse it. But then I thought I should come up with something new and more New Orleans-y.
After some googling, I found this amazing image from Shutterstock.
If this was a client project, I would absolutely purchase this, because even though I changed it, I stole the concept. But since no money is exchanging hands, I drew my own city silhouette and piano keys.
Fonts
I didn't get too crazy here. The same script as the save the date, and a simpler one to go with it.
Final Product
To make it even more jazzy, I drew a simplified saxophone (or whatever. It looks like some kind of brass instrument, right?). Then I dug through my stock photo collection and put some partying ladies behind the city silhouette.
If I do any more bachelorette parties, I'll have to break away from pink, but for only 2 I think the repeat color scheme is permissible. I'd also like to allay any potential concerns that I might repeat my previous bachelorette party planning errors. There will be no strippers.
Have you ever planned a trip for a group of people? What bachelorette party mishaps have you experienced?
