One special branding detail that I knew I wanted our wedding to have was a custom crest. I'm not sure when this tradition originated, or why it's gotten so popular with weddings as of late. But I knew I loved custom crests and definitely wanted one! 😊 Having a custom crest is such an easy way to elevate the design elements surrounding your wedding, and to give everything a cohesive and polished feel. I thought it would be fun to share a post on the design process for our crest, and also recap all the ways that I used it for the wedding day and beyond.
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While there are lots of graphic designers and/or water color artists who do custom wedding crests, I was unbelievably lucky to have ours come from a close friend. My friend Bri created all of the design elements for her own wedding a few years ago, and is very skilled with graphic design as a hobby pursuit! She offered to make us a custom crest that I could use for the wedding to help build her own portfolio, and I couldn't believe what a generous gift that was. (Did I mention that Bri's main job is being a professional wedding cake baker at Baking It Caking It? We also hired her for our wedding cake!! I swear Bri was the backbone of bringing my whole wedding vision to life. 😉)
I sent Bri some mood boards and inspiration photos that I had for our wedding a couple months after we got engaged. One evening in March 2024, I went over to Bri's house and literally got to watch her design out crest! Below is the earliest picture I have of it:
Pictured below is the original crest design Bri came up with after our design meeting! I loved the bold flowers on both the lower part and the top art. The only feedback I had for her was that the flowers weren't accurate to the floral quote I had received from our florist. We weren't having any type of yellow flowers at the wedding, so I wanted the yellow removed, and a few other types of flowers added that our florist did say we would have (like blue delphinium and hot pink tulips).
And here's the final version that Bri came back with after some floral tweaks! She used the actual floral contract and estimate that I had been given from my florist* to tweak the flowers in the crest to be accurate. I was absolutely in love with this!! Now it was just time to find the right font for a monogram in the center.
*(My wedding floral experience became a gigantic disappointment, and unfortunately my wedding day flowers didn't look very accurate to the types of flowers listed on the contract I had signed, which also means they didn't look very accurate to the crest. 😕 The floral mess is a longer story for another day.... but Bri did a fantastic job capturing what my wedding flowers were SUPPOSED to look like!)
And below is the finished crest, with our interlocking monogram! I could not be more obsessed with how this looked. It perfectly captured the colors and essence that I wanted our wedding to have. The design was finished up by Bri in April 2024, about seven months before the wedding.
Ready to see all of the places that we used our wedding crest? The beauty of having a crest is that the possibilities are kind of endless for what you use it for! With a bigger wedding budget, I could have found lots more places to use it. 😉 But I am happy with what we did use it for.
The first time that our guests saw our wedding crest is when wedding invitations were received in the mail! Did I mention that Bri also designed our custom invitation suite as a gift to us?! What an amazing friend she is! I'll share more about our invitation suite design in a future Wedding Wednesday post, but we did opt to use the crest itself on two of the little enclosure cards. It was on the Details card (which had addresses for the ceremony and reception venues, dress code, wedding website info etc), and our Welcome Party Invitation card, which was a smaller invite than the main wedding invitation. The Details card is pictured below!
I ordered custom stickers with our wedding crest to put on the welcome bags for our out-of-town guests that were staying in hotels in Virginia Beach. I think I spent more on the stickers alone vs. the gift bags or tissue paper... but worth it! I uploaded our crest to custom stickers from VistaPrint.
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I also had the crest printed onto custom cocktail napkins for Cocktail Hour at our wedding reception. I ordered them from Zazzle!
I removed the monogram out of the crest file on Canva to design table number cards for the reception! I bought these affordable gold table number holders to display them at each table.
We did a custom photo mat for one of our wedding guest books! (We also had a traditional guest book as well.) I partnered with small business Mat & Ink to bring this to life. The crest printed so beautifully on this! I treasure the finished frame piece now.
And I also received a couple of very thoughtful gifts with our crest! The first is from my friend Bri, the crest creator. She had it printed onto a decorative acrylic block as a gift for our engagement party last spring (which was right after she finished designing it!). I loved it so much that I chose to include it for the detail photos with our photographer on the wedding day.
My best friend from high school, Julia, loved our crest and did a couple of gifts for me based off of it! She ordered a custom ornament with the design, which I am just obsessed with! Such a fun tribute to our wedding to see on the tree each year now.
Those are just the places that I used our wedding crest, but the branding and design opportunities to use one are kind of endless! If I'd had a bigger wedding budget, here are some other places I would've used one:
- Ceremony programs and reception menus (we skipped both of these things for cost savings)
- Personalized wedding favors like custom matchbooks, custom cookies or koozies
- And so much more!
Once again, a huge thank you to my sweet friend Bri for designing this beautiful wedding crest for us. I'll be sharing more about our amazing wedding cake that she made (and our custom invitation suite that she designed!) in my next Wedding Wednesday post!
Past Wedding Wednesday Posts:
Before the Wedding: Our Proposal Story // My Ring Shopping Experience // Local vs. Destination Wedding // My Wedding Dress Shopping Story // 9 Months Out Checklist + Early Wedding Planning Q&A // How Ryan and I Met // Our Engagement Photos // Virginia Beach Wedding Guest Lodging with Transcendent Stays // Our Engagement Party // 6 Months Out Checklist + Q&A // How I Asked My Bridesmaids // My First Bridal Shower // 3 Months Out Checklist + Q&A // My Second Bridal Shower // My Bachelorette Party // Doing My Own Wedding Day Makeup // Wedding Week Reflections
God Bless,
xoxo Annaliese
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