Sean and Steve at a marriage equality rally in 2013. Photo by Chris Trueblood.

Steve and I are immensely fortunate. We live in a country and at a time when our marriage is a legally-recognized possibility. We’re surrounded by supportive family and friends who eagerly cheer us on. We have the means to host a celebration for those closest to us. There are many — past and present — in far less fortunate circumstances.

To a certain degree, one’s wedding is an inherently self-centered event. It’s a celebration of you, your partner, and your relationship together.

But for us, our wedding also represented an opportunity to merge our overlapping communities, share a potentially new experience of diversity with the people we love, and throw a really great party for those who’ve supported us in our lives.

With those goals in mind, we set out to design an event that reflected our identities in an honest, fun, and stylish way. As a designer, I relished the opportunity to flex some familiar muscles (website design) and learn some new things as well (print design, event/space design, etc). And although Steve is not a designer by trade, he was more than willing to help along the way with feedback and support.

This is the first in a series of posts about my experience designing a wedding with my fiancé, and the things we learned along the way. In this post, I’ll focus on how we chose a theme and created a design system — unifying everything else we would make in order to pull off a successful event.