If you’ve ever planned a destination wedding or know someone who has, you know exactly what I’m talking about when I say what a pain it is to find the perfect wedding invitation. You might find designs adorned with pineapples or graphic depictions of a passport but those graphics alone don’t tell your guests much more than they’re going somewhere. In addition to the pineapple, you’ll also be expected to include 17 other invitation inserts, velum or otherwise, that entail hotel and air information, a list of events and anything else under the sun your guests (some well traveled and others who have never crossed the state line) are curious to know.

I didn’t want a pineapple. I didn’t want the cliche passport with our wedding date as the traveler number. I especially didn’t want the 17 inserts. I wanted a descriptive brochure outlining the adventure we had planned for our guests and a design that even the Four Seasons would commend me for.

Instead of wasting anymore time browsing Pinterest or Etsy for overly done destination invites, I instead starting comparing travel brochures against one another, paying special attention to the types of information they highlighted and the imagery they used. I didn’t want an invite, I wanted a wedding brochure!

I spent the next few days developing my content, writing down the language and working with my resort, Sandos Finisterra, for photography. I created a content outline and was able to identify that I needed the following information sections and therefore 6 brochure panels:

The Invitation (front panel)
Accommodations
Itinerary
Travel & Booking
All Inclusive Details
Additional Details

Once I laid out the content with each brochure panel, I enlisted Amy Goldsmith with AEG design to help me with the graphic work and help me construct the design I was envisioning. The end result was something magical and a destination wedding concept I had never seen before: A Destination Wedding Invite Brochure. I was (I am!) ecstatic!

In addition to the brochure, we included RSVP postcards (less postage cost than a return card with envelope) and added a wax seal stamp to our guests’ envelopes. I will tell you, if you’ve never done the whole wax seal thing before, just know what you’re getting yourself into before you start. It was (eventually) fun and they turned out beautiful, but MAN was it a ton of work with a major learning curve. We purchased our personalized “S” seal on Etsy and ocean colored wax set from Amazon.

For those of you hoping to create similar for your future destination wedding, don’t hesitate to reach out to Amy Goldsmith with AEG design. She’ll treat you right and does amazing work, clearly!