Amazing Wedding Invite – Paper Record Player

Well this is just plain amazing.

As a designer and music-loving dj who is also engaged to be married – this cheeky little invite appeals to me in so many ways. I vividly remember paying with my Dad’s records when I was very young, and I’m pretty sure my Dad also remembers it well. Possibly not quite as fondly as me though, as I once tried to make a gramaphone with a paper cone, a pin and yes, you guessed it – Dad’s prized vinyl collection. Scratchy scratchy.

Anyway, back to the task at hand… here we have a brilliantly inventive, creative, and beautifully designed and produced wedding invite by Kelli Anderson. Rather than rewrite the description, I’ll let Kellli tell you about it:

I just finished up a really fun project—a paper record player wedding invitation! In the booklet-style invitation, a bit of paper-folding amplifies the sound of a sewing needle moving along the grooves of a flexidisc record. The hand-spun record yields a garbled, but scrutable listening of a original song by the couple. It requires a bit of tinkering and folding —effectively championing the inner science-nerd kid in the recipient. The whole thing serves as an interactive packaging for the song—which can be experienced on the paper record player, unscrewed + set on a regular turntable, or enjoyed online (for the non-nerds and/or audiophiles out there.) Here is a video of the player in action:

Mike and Karen are two pretty awesome friends of mine—Karen advocates for the rights of programmers/inventors/coders as a lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center (and DJs by night) and Mike is a Grammy-nominated sound engineer. I’ve long considered their love of music and collaborative auditory endeavors (such as their Oscar Meyer WeinerMobile-Girl song) a touching aspect of their relationship and an important part of our friendship (I met Karen at a concert.) It therefore felt really important that the invitation reference the social role of music in bringing people together… and ideally would feature an original song by the couple to seal the deal. Karen and Mike immediately got it, loved the idea, and wrote the catchy track that appears on the flexi. We then only had to figure out how to make the invitation play it.

I really love it. This kind of design really makes my day

Please do head on over to Kelli’s website to find out more about this brilliant wedding invite design project.