SEGD Pride: Wonder Woods Wedding
Read Time: 3 minutes
June is a month of milestones and celebrations as students graduate, couples marry and summer begins. In recognition of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, SEGD invites you to attend an unconventional—yet very fun—wedding, complete with its own brand identity and graphic design package. Read on to see how SEGD member Joe Lawton and his partner (now husband) Jamon Deaver created and designed their three-day wedding celebration.
When Joe Lawton and Jamon Deaver decided to get married, they knew they wanted a different type of celebration.
“We had been talking for a while about what we wanted to do for our wedding,” says Joe. “We really enjoy music festivals and concerts, and we said, ‘Well, let’s do something that people will remember and enjoy and be a part of.’”
And so, Joe and Jamon decided to host an outdoor wedding festival on land owned by Jamon’s family, located just outside Berea, Kentucky. The three-day event—named Wonder Woods Wedding—included live music and art performances for 225 guests over the Summer Solstice weekend (June 19 through June 21).
Joe is Principal of Media-Objectives (a.k.a. “M-O”), an experiential design studio within the Chicago-based architecture firm of Valerio Dewalt Train. There, Joe and his team are responsible for creating a variety of experiential design projects—from signage and wayfinding to logos and branding—all aligned with the firm’s architectural practice.
M-O’s motto is “We design connections.” What better guiding principle for a wedding celebration intended to connect family and friends from all parts of the world?
“[The wedding] is actually a pretty big moment of bringing people back together [after quarantine and social distancing] and celebrating the beauty of the Earth,” says Joe. “It made a lot of sense to do it here [in the Appalachian foothills] because we wanted to be a bit of a shining light to the community, considered a conservative place, but to show a very welcoming, fun, inclusive type of event, and also to show the beauty of this place [to the wedding guests] and the beauty of its people.”
To visually express these connections, Joe (along with Jamon’s input) developed brand guidelines for the event which include the wedding’s logo, invites, website, outdoor signage and other design elements. Inspired by the three W’s in “Wonder Woods Wedding,” Joe created the event’s logo using overlapping and intersecting lines, which represent a layering of people and an expression of infinity.
“We chose Summer Solstice weekend because it aligns with the whole idea of the sun and celebrating the energy of the sun,” says Joe. “[We also chose] June because it’s Pride Month.”
For the event’s larger graphic identity, Joe turned his attention to the simple geometry of the circle, inspired by the O’s in “Wonder Woods,” but also the solar and lunar circles.
“I really love clean, geometric, bold graphics,” says Joe. “There is a graphic artist, Morag Myerscough, who does these beautiful outdoor visuals and paints large, bold, geometric graphics that served as inspiration.”
For color, Joe created warm and cool palettes inspired by the sun and moon. The variety of colors within each palette are reflective of the rainbow colors of the Pride Flag (although rendered in much more muted tones!)
“[I said] let’s do the idea of a Pride Flag, but not a Pride Flag [itself]. The idea that it’s this rainbow of colors to talk about love and energy and inclusivity,” explains Joe. “And it also breaks down into a warm palette and a cool palette as it relates to a quote that Jamon found early on: ‘Live by the sun and love by the moon.’”
So now, in addition to the professional experiential graphics that Joe and his team create for Valerio Dewalt Train, he can add to his portfolio a comprehensive graphics package for his own wedding celebration—something that Joe’s and Jamon’s guests will remember for a long time.
So, congrats to Joe and Jamon on their recent nuptials! And thank you both for inspiring other SEGD members with the powerful graphics you designed for Wonder Woods Wedding.