A Wedding Unbounded by Distance
Interactive wedding website capturing a special event taking place under a global pandemic.
Interactive wedding website capturing a special event taking place under a global pandemic.
To celebrate and share a wedding event that happened during a global pandemic in 2020.
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Bootstrap, HTML, CSS
The year 2020 was a year of change and adaptation. Many couples had planned for traditional wedding parties and ceremonies that got suspended due to the massive spread of the human transmitted virus - COVID-19. It was no different for my wedding, which was supposed to take place on November 7th, 2020.
While my husband and I were planning for our wedding early in 2020, an outbreak came around the States in March, a nation-wide lockdown followed, putting a lot of our original wedding plans up in the air. As the virus continued to spread, restaurant businesses that weren’t able to recover from the sudden drop of sales started to fall apart. One day, we received a bankruptcy notice from the restaurant we had placed a deposit for our banquet. Luckily, we were able to get our full refund back. However, at this point, we were unsure what we should do with our wedding.
Despite the pandemic, my husband and I still wanted to tie the knot one way or the other. We did some research and learned about the COVID-safe wedding ceremony hosted by the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. Limitation breeds creativity, so instead of postponing the wedding, we had an idea to create a story of love with the use of our individual creative talents through a custom built website. On it, we captured the events that would take place, to share with our friends and family members who would not be able to attend in person.
With the nature of this project being a personal event, I took the lead to work on most of the project from my own vision. I conducted research, executed design concepts, drafted wireframes, brought together high-fidelity mockups, created visual content, and coded the website with the use of a CSS framework.
Every wedding has a story - giving it a name and social media handle were the first couple of things we started with.
#DooBeeWed was our social media hashtag, intended for the use by our friends and family - it is a play on the sound of words from our nicknames to we gave each other early on in our relationship, forming a fun and playful hashtag that stands for DeeDoo (me) and BeeBoo (Bryan) to be wed.
We feel very lucky to have been introduced to each other through our parents, and over the years the internet allowed us to grow closer into a friendship that was unbounded by distance, and then to finally beunited as a happy couple. Without the loving friendship and genuine interest in each other, we would not have ended up walking down the path together, and so we named our story - Celebration of Love.
As we begin to think about all the little details in a wedding - the venue, the dress, the flower, and banquet decorations, a moodboard begins to spark inspiration.
With my Graphic Design background, our Special Day will be the perfect occasion for which to design the stationery, and so the creative process begins with a logo mark that embodies both of our initials, a graphic suggestion and color story that paints a picture and evokes a feeling of the wedding theme that we both love.
With the Fall wedding date, originally chosen ceremony venue and banquet location, we have settled on a color palette that is warm and infused with our favorite colors - blue and burgundy.
As a couple of Chinese descent, performing a tea ceremony, in which we serve tea to honor and thank our elders, was an essential part of the wedding. The traditional Chinese wedding colors are cheerful red and luxury gold. However, those colors lean toward Summer tones. Instead of incorporating bright red into a Fall color palette, I have designated burgundy to be the alternative red, which also determined the base color for the Cheongsam I designed and sewed together from scratch.
To bring out the romantic look and feel for the stationery, I have chosen a few serif typefaces with various weights and tracking. As for the website, I went with a sans-serif typeface for better readability.
While Zoom weddings became a trend during this time, as a private couple, we wanted to first enjoy our day among ourselves, instead of broadcasting our day live, especially when it took place during the week, where most of our guests would either be working or snoozing in their respective timezones. Also, we wanted our guests to be able to enjoy the virtual event at a place and time they will feel most comfortable at.
The main goal of the wedding website is to paint a vivid story for our friends and family, who were not able to participate in person, to witness our unity and enjoy our token of love we prepared for them. It is meant to be shared privately with the invited guests, opened upon receipt of our hand-crafted wedding favors.
With the combination of creative copywriting, beautiful and professional photography, and “vlog” style video clips of the behind the scenes process, I made sure the content was easy to consume, digest, and worth savoring after.
With the use of a CSS framework, I was able to quickly build a presentable website that encompasses most of the components I envisioned in the beginning.
For the copy, I have appointed my husband to use his creative writing skills to paint our wedding day with words, following the wireframe as a guide for the suggested length of each blurb and paragraph. To better keep track of the edits, we logged most of our reviews and comments on a shared Google Doc, streamlining our creative process.
For the images, I have edited the ones taken by our own cameras, making sure the color tones are coherent with the professional pictures taken by our tea ceremony day photographer, which use warm and bright tones that exude joy and happiness.
For the videos, I have edited the multiple short clips taken with our own cameras, customizing the sequences with storytelling of the days leading up to the wedding day, as well as a brief behind the scenes making of our hand-crafted wedding favors.
The story behind our wedding favors was actually inspired by our very own wedding speeches. A set of consumable hot cocoa with mini marshmallows that symbolize the personality differences between my husband and me. Delivered in reusable pudding jars, and finished with a reusable gift wrapping cultural art called Furoshiki. We wanted our recipients - our family and friends - to not only enjoy our small token gifts, but be able to reuse them for other occasions. Each and every favor is packaged with a hangtag that has a QR code and URL for receivers to scan to visit the aforementioned website before enjoying the content of the gift.
As every wedding has social and engagement components, we wanted the same for our wedding website. Instead of sending them a one-way dialogue, we presented an interactive hot cocoa tasting section and guestbook section on the website for our receivers to participate as they wish.
As the packages began to arrive in our friends’ and family members’ hands, we started to receive feedback from our parents and friends. Turns out, each and everyone responds to gift opening differently, even when they are packaged completely identical. Some had read all the fine details of the package before opening the actual content, whereas some had forgone anything with writing on it and went straight to opening the actual physical package.
Those who had read through everything ended up participating in our interactive sections toward the end of the website, which surprisingly was not a lot of them. Those who did not learn about the website from the packaging, responded saying “Thank you for the hot cocoa!”, which we had to redirect them to go back and find the website URL or QR code. Once everyone had gotten a chance to read through the website, their feedback was fairly similar - they were touched by every little detail captured in the content of the website, and some even felt like they had attended our virtual wedding in their own VIP seat.
The 2020 pandemic may have been the worst year in many people’s lives, but for my husband and me, it was special in a way that was irreplaceable. A year that opened a lot of creative opportunities, allowing our wedding to be less traditional and more personal, a monumental event that took place in an unforgettable year.