First DIY Project: Monograms

I consider myself rather IT literate and I'm hoping to embark on a lot of DIY projects myself (certainly know my Word from my Excel, my Publisher from my Powerpoint). So last weekend I attempted to design my own monograms. Monograms are great - they can jazz up your invites, personalise your aisle runners or just be a decorative feature as part of your wedding. 

Normally when designing things I use Publisher, (which most printers hate!), particularly since I am yet to master Photoshop or InDesign. This time round however I decided to use PowerPoint - yes you heard correctly! Powerpoint is a design software in disguise. Albeit it's not as all-singing-and-dancing as Photoshop, but it does what you need it to do. In this case, putting together a monogram. Below is my first effort with step-by-step instructions of how I did it.

Step 1.

I drew a text box which would have my name and FI name. I chose a standard font - Book Antiqua and change the colour to my wedding colour and increased the size to 36.

Step 2.

I drew another text box for the initial, which in our case is 'E' and I chose a script font (Edwardian Script) and increase the point to around 200. As this was going to sit in the background, I changed the colour to a light grey.

Step 3.

I moved the text boxes so that the 'E' would sit in the middle.

Step 4.

I drew another text box and position that under my name, which I used for the date. Again same purple colour, but smaller font size (18).

Step 5. 

Highlight all the text boxes and paste into Microsoft Office Picture Manager. This then saves the file as png (picture file) and voila!

The great thing about a png file as I learnt today is that all the white area is transparent so you can put the image on any background and the colour will come through.

In the words of Blue Peter...here's a couple I made earlier.

 

In my quest for monograms I originally contacted Nicole from Pink Event Designs as I had seen her work on Project Wedding. She was fantastic and came back with 6 designs:

Think I'm preferring hers!