Designing our wedding as one connected service, from invitation and guest operations to a live film screening and a shared archive.
Client
Independent
Role
Co-designer / Maker / Groom
Period
2026 · 4 months
Signal
3 months / 100+ guests / 50-person party / 2 languages
A wedding that began long before the ceremony
We treated the invitation, gatherings, website, venue, ceremony, and memories afterward as one connected service.
In Korea, a wedding begins months before the ceremony. The couple moves through family meetings, a home, venue and vendor decisions, photo shoots, rings, a honeymoon, and many gatherings where they share the news.
Friends, coworkers, family, our parents’ guests, and people overseas all enter that process with different needs. We wanted every touchpoint to feel recognizably ours without letting the budget grow without limits.
The project at a glance
3 months · from venue booking to ceremony
100+ · people we wanted to meet
50 · guests at one invitation party
2 · languages across the service
Start with criteria, not the template
The market offered more choices than we could ever compare. It could not decide what felt like us.
We set four measures of success: high quality, a reasonable cost, our own branding, and guest satisfaction. Those criteria helped us decide what to use as-is, what to redesign, and what to postpone.
We researched more than ten venues and chose a discounted opening only three to five months away. We gave up the perfect date, found a space we loved at a manageable cost, and accepted a compressed schedule. Finding our long-term home could wait until after the wedding.
A four-minute film about our meeting, wedding preparation, and the day that became both a finale and a new beginning.
The directions page translated a complicated underground route into landmarks guests could recognize at the exact moment they needed them. · CMS Media #107 · layout:wide
We made the first screen. Our guests completed the last page.
Project reflection
The film brought the website’s story into the room
I introduced the film myself and turned a familiar ceremony item into a small screening we could share with our guests.
We made a four-minute film about how we met and the many firsts we experienced during three months of preparation. It connected the proposal, our family meeting, studio shoots, invitation gatherings, and the 50-person party into one narrative.
On the wedding day, I took the microphone and introduced the film before it played. Our guests were not only seeing the final ceremony. They could understand what had brought us there, then experience the next part of the wedding with that shared context.
The website let people explore our story in their own time. The screening let everyone in the room experience it together. Both carried the same narrative in different ways.
Sanghyo & Jieun Wedding: A Wedding Film
A good venue came with a difficult route
Choosing the space also meant taking responsibility for the inconvenience that choice created.
Sono Felice gave us a private lobby, large displays, and a grand staircase that extended the entrance scene. Its connection to COEX also made the underground route difficult for first-time guests.
We walked every route ourselves, photographed landmarks and turns, and rebuilt the directions page around what guests would actually see. Near the ceremony, the site surfaced directions and photo upload ahead of the earlier storytelling content.
Our guests completed the final page
The strongest result was not a screen we had designed. It was the archive our guests chose to fill.
Guests shared the invitation party on Instagram Stories, made a YouTube vlog, filled the physical book with Polaroids, and uploaded photos and messages to the website. Friends and coworkers overseas joined through the English page even when they could not attend.
Owning the URL mattered most after the ceremony. The invitation did not expire into a notice from the past. It became a living archive made by people who were there and people who were not.
AI made the build possible. Judgment made it ours.
The most valuable skill was not writing the perfect prompt. It was knowing whether the result was good enough to use.
AI let a designer who could not write code build a real invitation service in a short time. It could not decide which idea deserved to exist, explain why the first result felt wrong, or choose among endless possible additions.
Intent, taste, and decision-making stayed with us. That is also how I think about design at work: set the purpose, make something real, watch it meet people and constraints, then improve it.
The invitation became a working service
A mobile invitation needed to tell our story before the wedding, then become an operational tool as the day approached.
Existing services limited the URL, visual system, layout, real-time RSVP data, and how long the page would remain online. By early 2026, AI-assisted coding made it possible for me to build a real alternative without writing the code myself.
The first AI draft worked, but it did not feel like us. Jieun and I returned to Figma, rebuilt the key visual, and designed the experience around a Prague snapshot taken before we had decided to marry. The illustrated couple fades into the real photo as the guest scrolls.
The service grew into bilingual invitations, RSVP and guest management, galleries, a participatory guestbook, party pages, and HYOHOUSE guides. When browser autoplay required a click, we turned that constraint into a seal guests had to break to open the invitation and begin the music.
We could not meet 100 people, so we invited 50 at once
The group party was not a scaled-up dinner. It needed its own social structure.
We kept smaller meetings where they felt more natural, then rented an entire wine bar for a 50-person invitation party. Eleven relationship groups shaped the first seating so old friends could reconnect. In the second half, we mixed the tables and used a quiz about our story to help new conversations begin.
I led the concept, theme, and invitation structure. Jieun improved the quiz, found high-quality gifts within the budget, and handled the details that kept the experience working on site.
When early guests wrote only their names in the physical guestbook, Jieun added the first casual note and Polaroid herself. One example changed the empty state, and the remaining pages filled with stories and photos.
