If you are interested in do it yourself wedding invitations there are a few things you need to know, even if you are using a wedding invitation kit.

Designing Wedding Invitations by Choosing Fonts

The first thing people tend to do when they design wedding invitations with their word processor is pick out the most funky font possible. Now, I can’t really blame most people for making these mistakes because there are only so many decent fonts that come installed with Windows, but if you are planning on creating your own wedding invitations, then buying at the least, a decent script font would be a good idea. You are spending a good amount of money on the invitations and therefore the most important thing on them, the couple’s names, should be gorgeous, or at least look good. You can get some fonts that look good for around $20-35. I would not go looking for free fonts because you will most likely get some more cheesy fonts. The following are common fonts that people use and they are just bad. Please don’t use them for a wedding invitation:

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The following are some examples of good fonts, but may be a little pricey:

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Decent Fonts Installed on Windows

Arial
Franklin
Georgia Lucida
Palatino
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet

A good place to buy a script font is Veer or
Linotype or Fonts.com.

You could also take a look at my Wedding Invitation Layout Design Service and not worry about the fonts at all.

What Graphic Designers Can do That You Can’t

This is where a graphic designer will have more options than the typical do it yourselfer. A designer will have a library of fonts to picks from because they have invested the money in the fonts. As if that were not enough, they also have the major advantage of being able to use the fonts that they have collected in a way the rookie cannot. They have the programs, such as Adobe Illustrator and Indesign, that can take advantage of hidden characters in fonts with the Opentype abilities. For example they can take the normal font and turn them into something really fancy, like the above.

How to Use your Fonts for Wedding Invitation Design

Another major mistake that people tend to do is set all of the type in a script type or in italic. This is really a terrible thing to do. People are not trained to read large amounts of script type and this is especially cumbersome. It is particularly difficult for older people that do not have as sharp of eyesight as they once did. The only exception I would make for doing this is if you were planning on having a calligrapher hand do every invitation. The best way to think about script type is that it should be the icing on the cake. Use it for the names of the couple and headers on map cards and choice type.

Choosing Type Sizes
Whenever you are creating an invitation it is a good idea to vary the sizes, but of course this should be done in moderation. You wouldn’t want too many size variations. You should probably not use more than 3 different sizes. It is also best to not use size 12 type for the body text. This really is a little large. Size 10 to 11 would be best in most cases. The names of the couples should most likely be a little larger, but not too big, there should still be at least a quarter of an inch to half an inch of margin.

Capitalization
Something that I have seen people do before is use all Caps in a script type. This is bad. These fonts are not designed to be used like this. Using all caps is usually not a good idea in general because people recognize words by their shapes. All caps is difficult to read because the words become square blocks. Suffice it to say, you can get away with using all caps on wedding invitations if you use small caps, which is like the example with the font serlio in where the first letter is a bit bigger than the others. It would also be ok if you make sure the space between the lines was a little bigger than normal and making sure to keep the font small. If you are trying to make a bold statement, a limited amount of type set in a large size can work very well, like the first image in this post.

Legibility
Legibility is also something that you will need to keep in mind. Make sure, especially when designing with vellum, that you can easily read all of the information. It is a good idea to print out your invitations and make a sample wedding invitation at least once when you think you are done designing the wedding invitation.

Appreciate the Contrasts
Something to keep in mind when designing a wedding invitation is that contrasts between fonts is a good thing. Using a type that doesn’t have feet, which is called a sans serif font with a font that is scripty can be a beautiful things and lends a more modern tone to the invitation.

Envelope Sizing
There is just about nothing worse than folding your invitation in half so that it fits in your envelope. Make sure to pick your envelope before you create your invitations.

There are many other things to learn about type. Hopefully you will avoid making some of the common pitfalls whenever you design wedding invitations for your wedding.

Good Examples:

Bad Examples:

For whatever reason you may not always be able to pay somebody else to create your wedding invitations. You may even have the desire to create do it yourself or diy wedding invitations. If this is the case there are a few things that you will need to keep in mind.

Most of the time trying to create do it yourself wedding invites can be a daunting task whenever you are not use to doing this type of work. There are a lot of things to choose from. You’ll have to decide if you simply want to print the invitations and have that be it or if you would also like to add extra things like ribbons and additional paper layers into the mix.

The first thing you may need to ask yourself is what type of theme do you want to center the invitation around. Usually if you pick one thing to focus the decor of the invitation around this can make it a lot easier to come to a clean solution that will look more professional.

Whenever it comes to the actual font that you will use for the invitation it is best to pick a highly legible neutral font for the body type of the invitation. You should use a script font or more stylized font for the names and any header type that you use in the other pieces such as the RSVP cards or any map cards that you plan on creating. You should also consider not using the standard 12 point type that comes on your computer. Usually this type size really is a little large and the invitation will probably look better with a 10 to 11 point type. If you have a legible font this will not be a problem for people to read.

Invitations are typically 5 x 7 in size although many other sizes have become popular especially in recent times. You can get away with using a first class stamp for envelopes that are as small as 3.5″ x 5″ and as large as 6 1/8″ high by 11 1/2″ long and no thicker than 1/4″ thick. You also need to make sure that your envelope does not weigh more than 3 ounces. You can get away with getting quite a bit of things in an envelope before this occurs. The only thing that you really need to watch out for is that you don’t end up creating a square invitation. Square invitations cost more to put in the mail because they cannot be processed through the postage machine like other mail.

Of course you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch whatever it comes to creating your invitations. There are plenty of wedding invitation kits out there that you can buy. The problem is that they do tend to cost a bit but if you look hard enough I’m sure you can find something on sale. The reality of it is that just buying the materials can cost a lot. If you want quality paper and quality envelopes it is going to cost you more than it would a wedding invitation company because they can buy them in bulk and get a much better price. It is definitely worth doing a price comparison to get an idea of if you believe you are going to be able to do them yourself and actually have them be cheaper.

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you with the creation of your invitation. The professionals use special software created by Adobe that costs thousands of dollars and take a lot of time to learn. It is very possible to use Microsoft Word to create your invitations. It is a bit more difficult because you don’t have a high level of control but it is definitely doable. This would be a difficult program to use if you wanted to do anything rather complicated. If you are only interested in setting the type up then Microsoft word will do the job. You could also use Microsoft publisher which is a pretty good program for doing different layouts.

If you are creating a large amount of invitations I would highly suggest that you take your printed paper to Kinko’s and have them cut it to the right size because they will be able to do it much more accurately and in any much smaller amount of time. Plus it only costs about a dollar to cut through 500 sheets of paper. you might even decide it is worth it to just have them do the printing as well, although if you are planning to do this in color this will probably be one of the greatest costs of doing the wedding invitations yourself.

As far as the actual assembly there are lots of tools to help you out with this as well. If you’re doing any folding I would highly suggest you get yourself an easy way to score the paper before you create the fold. This is important because if you don’t create a score first the paper will bulge and not look very pretty. I personally have a cutterpede with a scoring cartridge that I use for this. You can get them at Amazon here:

The company that makes this also has many different types of cartridges that do decorative edges if you are interested in adding that type of detail to the invitation. If you do get the cutterpede you should know that it comes with a normal cutting cartridge so if you don’t have a paper cutter this is a great thing to get because it does many different tasks. There are also many different types of paper punches that create all sorts of different shapes. If you are planning on using a ribbon you should definitely consider getting the hole punch that has two slits so that you can more easily and more accurately thread the ribbon.

One thing you should keep in mind whenever you are making all of these decisions about how you’re going to create a do it yourself invitation is that every extra step takes more time. There is nothing wrong with spending a lot of time on your wedding invitations but if you feel that you are running out of time it would probably be best to limit the amount of extra steps you’ll have to take in order to complete one. It would be a good idea to time yourself whenever it comes to creating about 10 of these and then you’ll have a decent idea of how much time it will take for you to do them all. Of course at the completion stage you will most likely have your bridesmaids helping you out by putting them together with you. Do try and keep all of this in mind because you’ll also need to address the envelopes and that typically takes a lot of time all on its own.

If you are looking for some more things to help you decorate your wedding invitations then take a look at my amazon Store.

If you would like some better software to help you design your wedding invitations I highly recommend Adobe products. I use Adobe for all of the designing that I do. They create top of the line software for professional designers all over the world.. The only disadvantage to the casual user is that they can be expensive. Fortunately, they do have a great program for the casual user called
Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 -, which is affordable and easier to use than their professional software. This will definitely help you with any sort of photos that you would like to put into your wedding invitations.