Although Carla David says she never intended to become a graphic designer, let alone start her own invitation company, one of her childhood memories is telling. “When I was in grade school, my friend and I would make cards with stamps and sell them door-to-door to raise money for summer camp,” she says. After training to become an art teacher, then an art therapist, she ditched teaching and decided to get a degree in graphic design. “Teaching wasn’t quite the thing I loved to do, but I loved the art part.”
While she was serving as art director for Fillauer Companies, an orthotic and prosthetic manufacturer, one of David’s friends asked her to create a wedding invitation. Word got around, and suddenly she was taking on more invites in her spare time. “Eventually it became too much to do on the side, so I went full time at the beginning of 2008,” she says. Based in Fulton, Maryland, Carla David Design creates custom invitations for corporate events and weddings, plus collateral materials such as menus, programs, name tags, and table numbers. “A lot of people don’t realize that there are so many ways you can pull the design of an event together with paper goods,” she says.
Paper isn’t David’s only medium. To give invitations more interest and texture, she likes to incorporate surprising elements, like silk-screened fabric, twigs, and sand. Whatever the style, David says she is involved in every step of the process, from meeting with clients to adding embellishments by hand. “Some invite stores have you choose a design and they send it out to be made,” she says. “All of my invites are created and produced in-house.”
When developing an invitation for the Glen Echo Park Partnership for Arts and Culture’s Gala in the Park event in May, David found inspiration in the park’s historic Spanish ballroom. “I incorporated details like the tile on the floor and the shape of the windows, which became the shape of the invite,” she says.
Deborah Mueller, director of development for the organization, was so pleased with the results she brought David back this year. Mueller says, “Her initial designs were so strong that we made very few changes, and the turnaround on those changes was always quick and efficient.”
