As previously mentioned in my DIY list here, I am currently browsing through invitation card designs online, some of them being incredibly talented Etsy users who sell templates customised to our fancy and needs. This was originally thought and done by StripShidah, who did the same and then printed her cards at a local printing shop for as low as 40 cents per piece. I thought, what a genius plan to have a hand in your own invitation card process and save moolahs at the same time! I sukaaaa. And plus, it gives me an opportunity to customise my own envelopes which I have big, big plans for, but let’s keep that to another post shall we 🙂

I’ve pretty much decided which card design I want, but before sending the layout and content of the card to the seller, I realised that I still needed to craft a map of that included directions to Gurame, to be attached to the card. Takkan nak print screen dari Google Map kan (which I initially planned to but received disapproving looks from my mom) so I decided to make it more aesthetically appealing and user-friendly for my guests.

Using the print screen of the Google Map of the vicinity around my wedding venue, I pasted it onto a Powerpoint doc (because I can’t use Photoshop for nuts).

I used the drawing tool to trace and outline the major and minor roads leading to the venue, like so:

I started off with the expressway because it was straightforward, and pleasantly, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. The tool is very simple to use, even for drawing curves. To make the road appear thicker, I increased the weight of the line to 10 pts.

I continued to trace the other roads and colour-coded them in order to show how they were individually drawn, like below:

Personally, the minor roads leading out from the expressway were the hardest to trace but the trick is just to zoom in closer into the map and trace slowly. Got the hang of it after a while! Once I was done outlining all the roads I wanted, I standardised the colour so that it looked like this:

To give the end of the road near Gurame a “finished” look, I changed the end of the line from “flat”…

… to “round”:

After that, I was just left with simple tasks like annotating the roads and labelling nearby landmarks. Once I was done customising the map to my desired colour palette, I deleted the original Google Map in the background and VOILA. Here’s the finished map!!

I still don’t quite believe I managed to pull it off actually, but hey, the drive to create a map that matches the rest of the wedding invitation really motivated me to finish it. Call me sanggup or whatever, but these details matter, and I’m quite sure there are other brides out there who also share my sentiments 🙂