Guest Post: The Lego Party Invitation

I asked my incredibly talented husband to create an invitation to our son's Lego party. I showed him a few of the invitations I found on and pinned on Pinterest. He came up with an incredible design.  I asked him if he would share how he made it. Here is his explanation. Thanks for the awesome invitation, as well as the awesome tutorial!


The Lego Party Invitation by John Charles Donahue

My son’s birthday party was coming up and this year his birthday fell on the weekend following the last day of school. He was born around Memorial Day and his birthday is usually around two weeks after school is out. I think we have had one of his classmates ever show up for a birthday party. Finally, we may have a chance at changing that.

My little guy is really into Legos^® and he and my wife had been planning a Lego^® themed party for a couple of months. So, since I am the graphics specialist, it always falls to me to create an invitation for my kids birthday parties that uniquely represents who they are and what they are into that year.

Here is the invitation I created for his Lego^® party this year:

Here’s is how I created it.

1.     I downloaded the Lego^® background from clipart available from the Lego^® website. There is no download page. I just had to search Google^® for images and found one from the Lego^® website that I could snag.

2.     The image was small so I had to load it into Adobe Photoshop^® and carefully tile it together.

Here is the original image file downloaded from Lego^®.

Here is the tiled background I pieced together.

I exported that background image as a JPEG so I could use it easily in Adobe InDesign^®.

3.     I found a Lego^® style font. It looks almost exactly like the one used in their logo. If you Google® this font you will easily find it.

4.     Next I found a site where you can customize your own Lego^® Man.

It is found here:

http://www.reasonablyclever.com/mini-mizers/mini-mizer-2-0/

Next I cropped and converted the white background of this image to a transparent one using Adobe Photoshop^®.

Here is the resulting image:

5.     All that was left was to do was to assemble the elements in Adobe InDesign^®.

This involved dragging and droping graphics files, drawing and filling in boxes and creating text boxes and filling in the pertinent details.

6.     I exported the final result as a JPEG so I could upload it to Sam’s Club online photo service to be printed. The result was quite good, even if I was the one who created it.