Ideabook

The IdeaBook lets you choose custom gravestones from a broad range of styles. For each memorial you choose, you can enter text, images, and information that best represent the life you’re commemorating. Patten’s IdeaBook gives you the chance to visualize an infinite number of possibilities for creating the perfect memorial, and lets you save as many custom combinations as you wish.

Styles of Custom Monuments and Headstones

Patten’s IdeaBook helps visitors conceive the ideal, everlasting monument to the deceased family member, loved ones and friends. With an expansive array of styles, designs, images and placement options, the IdeaBook gives you the chance to try several memorial combinations until you find the perfect arrangement.

Custom headstones on the IdeaBook are divided into two main classifications:

• Classic headstones, tombstones, and memorials for gravesites and burial places that draw on styles that translate across different cultures and generations.
• Gravestones with angled, curved or special cuts reflecting more diverse, less conventional design elements.

Custom Headstone Design Features

Specific design elements on headstones can convey different ideas and suggestions about the lives they honor. Shapes that follow traditional construction styles can represent modesty, strength or common values. Alternate tombstone designs can support other, more personal meanings, like individuality, diversity, or unique ideas.

The IdeaBook lists a variety of headstone models, from customary, classic styles to more modern designs:

• Standard monuments. Traditional and vintage grave marker designs as seen in cemeteries all over the world, in a wide range of alternative shapes and cuts.
• Rustic and boulder. Headstones cut to have a “natural,” rough finish around the edges, resembling stone or a boulder.
• Heart-shaped. Memorials containing a heart shape as the basis for design or an accent.
• Tilted head markers affixed to or built atop a heavy base.
• Flat or beveled markers. Simple stones that are positioned flush to the grass with messaging on top.

Options are classified by the type and size of the grave: single, double, children, or family estate. You can browse images for custom monuments and headstones in grid or gallery view. You can also designate custom grave marker designs as “favorites” for easy access and viewing on repeated visits to the IdeaBook.

Personalized Elements

Our lives are greatly defined by the items, principles, activities, events or occupations that we’re most passionate about. Often these hallmarks are how others identify or remember us. The event of a life’s passing causes others to reflect on the deep importance those elements meant to the departed—and often how the deceased contributed to and honored those aspects.

The IdeaBook’s collection of customized gravestones, monuments, and tombstone designs includes images that depict the most essential interests, beliefs, connections, and work to represent what departed loved ones were most passionate about. IdeaBook images feature themes that convey aspects deeply related to the history of the departed, including:

• Religious affiliation. Symbols, icons and images illustration devotion to multiple faiths and creeds.
• Sports and leisure activities. Images that depict a lifetime love of individual and team sports and recreation, including golf, basketball, baseball, football, fishing, hiking and more.
• Natural elements. Backgrounds and engravings that capture a connection to nature, including forests, oceans, mountains, and flowers.
• Touching images of departed children, toys, hearts and animals.
• Pictures commemorating beloved dogs, cats or other pets, or wild and larger animals to convey affinity for other living beings.
• Military or patriotic symbols. Flags, armed forces symbols, military planes, and other patriotic icons.
• Occupational images. Representations of a life’s work, including tools, union logos, fraternal crests and shields, work scenes, and other images.
• Engravings of musical instruments, including guitar, piano, harmonica, brass instruments, and others, as well as musical symbols or notation.
• Icons that depict a wide variety of objects or likenesses that show lifelong interests, such as lighthouses, trains, homes, household items or other special articles.
• Inset photographs. Pictures or illustrations of the departed, including individual, couple, family or group photographs.

Patten’s IdeaBook offers a nearly limitless number of artistic combinations for you and your family to consider for your loved one’s custom mausoleum, gravestone or memorial. Its goal is to help you create a compelling, lasting image that perfectly captures the life and memories of the departed.

Custom Headstones for Generations of Memories

Monuments are symbols of endurance in more ways than one. They’re constructed to withstand through multiple generations and centuries, always there for the visits of loved ones, friends, even strangers.

Memorials also represent the endurance of the human spirit. They depict the nature and quality of the life they honor, the elements the departed held closest to their hearts and defined them to others.

Custom headstones illustrate the significance of a well-lived life, the love they shared with close ones, and the legacy they leave the rest of the world. Although we construct monuments in times of grief and sadness, the strongest memorials can also serve as inspiration for others, an appreciation for the eternal gifts the departed leave.

The IdeaBook helps loved ones visualize several ways to depict the memories the departed generates for ages to come. Its purpose is to help stimulate images and representations that will endure and resound for centuries, producing reflections that will be as meaningful to distant, future eras as they are now.

Every life has its individual and unique significance and purpose. IdeaBook helps those closest to the departed convey that importance for lifetimes to come.