Pyschadellic invite design

Was approached by someone at work the other day to create an invite for his girlfriend's 40th birthday party...

After speaking to her on the phone, turns out I'll be taking a really different project to the stuff I've been doing for a while. It's been years since I did anything for print for a start! So with Mike's help setting up the bleed etc, I got stuck in and back to my roots of event type promo graphics, AKA invites!

She found an image of a kaleidoscope pattern she really liked, however of course I couldn't just rip it off the web (I have morals and it would be low res anyway). So i created a kaleidoscope pattern in Illustrator. Seriously I thought my eyes were going to bleed! Once you work out the technique it's not too bad, but it's proven to me that my current set-up is bloody awful. My Macbook Pro gets too hot, my desk is too small to fit my laptop and tablet in the same space, so the tablet goes on the keyboard slidy-out thing underneath, but the laptop screen is still too far away and it's killing my eyes. I need an iMac now, I have a proper desk so I don't need a computer than can be packed away. But I don't know if I'd get enough for the MacBook Pro to be able to afford a new iMac... anyway.

For the reverse of the invite she gave me 25 photos from her life to make into a collage, she wanted a pic with her three kids to have price of place in the centre. I was going to make a cut-out style collage but I think they can look tacky unless you spend forever and a day on them, so I went for a more clean-cut approach with everything in different size boxes with white frames around, I'm quite pleased with it and guessed the layout right first time..I had visions of running out of space!

The of course I added some funky text and put the venue details etc on the back with a black background to make it look quite chic. So there you have it! Quite pleased seeing I'm a bit rusty on the old print work... i much prefer digital stuff... printers are so fussy!

This is just the front, I figured seeing as they are her personal photos it would be a bit of an invasion of her privacy to post the back section up. The pattern is what took most of the time anyway, I'm quite pleased with it!