Here's an old project from the archives. It's Christmas! Oh my, it's not even September and we're doing a post about Christmas already? It's so far away! Not if you're in retail, it's not. You'll probably have been planning since before the summer, how to make sure you capitalise on all those Christmas shoppers. And working as an Art Director on Vodafone for The Marketing Store (now TMS), that was how it was supposed to happen. At the time, I wasn't working on the 'main' Christmas campaign, but got handed this jolly little project quite close to deadline time. Harrod's being Harrod's, they had spectacular plans to bring the whole store to life in grand old Wizard of Oz style, as it was also the 70th anniversary of the movie. I was tasked with bringing a one of the window to life, along with designing a screen inside the main shop. Being able to utilise imagery from the film really brought the theme to life and the opting for a custom made domed turntable showcasing phones really caught the eye of passing traffic.

The background of the screen was put together using a photography I'd taken with a digital camera in the Harrod’s Christmas shop. The sparkly fairy lights. The problem was, after six months of planning, design and presentations, the main Vodafone Christmas campaign had gone off the rails slightly. I pushed to present adapted versions of this work and then helped develop it into Vodafone’s Christmas retail and advertising for that year.

When I asked my wife for her hand in marriage (well, being quite traditional  I asked her parents first of course!), I didn't quite know what I was getting myself in for! Now being a husband is great, one of the best things I ever decided to do – I can seriously recommend it.
The planning on the other hand, that is something else! Then how lucky I am to have married a wedding-planner-to-be. Renata, my bride, took pride in meticulously working out even the most minuscule of details, hand making lots of crafty items in the process and made sure everything came together smoothly. My main job was to try and earn some money to pay for it all! My second job, and quite possibly more important, was to create the invites for both day and evening guests, the order of service, table plan and a website to keep central, key information, as we had guests coming from different countries. All this on a tight budget, with very little spare time and probably the toughest client I was ever going to work with... me.

I wanted to produce something that captured both of our personalities, not be too formal and to hint a little bit about the sort of fun the day would entail. The day invite was designed as a simple A5 card, printed on a thick, white recycled matt board (so as to be a little bit kinder to the environment). To sit alongside this in the envelope, was an A6 RSVP postcard, cut from the same card stock, giving the guests a simple way to let us know what they wanted for dinner and of course whether they could make it at all! We also wanted to give people the option of RSVPing through the website, to cut down on postage.

The website was used mainly to give more information about the day, to RSVP and also to share videos of things like Elvis singing 'How Great Thou Art', one of our wedding hymns.

I wanted to do something a little different for the evening invite, so I set about building a HTML5 e-invite using Hype, which was hosted on a Dropbox account and linked to a separate evening RSVP page on the website.