Everything you have been sent is built from a very small number of decisions. They are written down here so that anything you make yourselves — a card at a place, a note on a gift, a sign at the door — still belongs to the same evening.
Navy carries about seventy per cent of every piece and cream leads on it. The greens are the only polychrome in the suite and they are deliberately several, not one — there is no single flat “Christmas green” anywhere, because the garland is never the same twice. Gold and red are incidents: a rule, a berry, a line. Neither is ever a field.
The garland is the mark, and it is also the whole idea. One display word stands at the centre and everything cut from the garden that morning grows around and across it, densest at the word and opening out at the corners. It may cross a letterform; it may never cross a line of information. That is the only rule it has.
Opaque white litho on a heavy uncoated sheet dyed navy all the way through, so the edge is navy too and there is no white core to show at a fold. Gold foil at small scale only. Nothing here shimmers — the room runs on eleven candles and a fire, and the suite is drawn for that light rather than for a screen.
This is your event's visual identity. If you make anything yourselves, use these exact colours and these two typefaces — the restraint is the design.
#101D2E · #F4EFE4 · #186048 · #487830 · #6C906C · #C9962F · #C4302B
Ardmore navy — the ground · Candle cream — every word · Spruce · Bay · Ivy, in candlelight · Gilt — an incident, never a field · Haw red — an incident, never a field, in that order.
Playfair Display and Cormorant Garamond are both free and open-source, and both are on Google Fonts — search the name, install the family, or pick it straight from the font menu in Canva, Google Docs or Word. You do not need a licence and you do not need to ask us.
Your locked palette is the source of these, and the ones beyond it were read off your delivered pieces — if you want those confirmed against the press proof, ask the studio.