Wedding Invites, a how to.

Right, for anyone who doesn't know me and B are engaged and we're planning to do most of the work ourselves, starting with the invites... which transpired to be incredibly easy!

We looked at few we've had in the past, pinched the bits we liked... we knew we wanted them simple/clear to read with not too much manual work.

I started by buying the card, I bought these they come in a box of 100 and with envelopes, making a nice square shape of 135*135mm. Once you know what shape card you have you can do the design, if you do the design before the card you might need to shop around for something more expensive.

I then went to 1001FreeFonts and picked a font to use, we're trying to have a simple theme so an old fashioned typewriter font suited: Here it is (be sure to check the licence, most are free to use for non-commercial use).

 

 As I mentioned, the card was 135*135 Square meaning designs are 270*135. I find the best way to do this is to create a layer ½ the size and place it on the left, this allows you to picture it as two halfs... front and back.

Throw the text on that you want, line it up so it looks nice.

Do the back, here we've done all the boring details like accommodation and the wedding list.

Mirror this for the inside too, here we've left the left side clear so we can stick in an A4 map to unfold nicely.

Don't make more work for yourself, for the evening invitation I've use the first as a template and only made slight changes to the text content.

It doesn't have to stop there, in Photoshop it's very easy to do a mail-merge like function. It's called variables, it's designed for much higher processing like mass production of web banners based on changing information in excel sheets. But it works just as well to produce invite with individual printed names... you need is a .csv file with a list of names in (as pictured above).

The finished product:

Run through the printer twice (once each side, with a long wait for the ink to dry).

The envelopes had a standard mail merge used, it was a bit of a faff to set the paper size correctly in word, but it did work in the end. For people with a whole address that got printed, most people are getting theirs hand delivered so it's just a name. We also used a rubber stamp to put a return address on the back, but that was mostly because I could.

I've skipped over any of the details, assuming you know how to do these. there are plenty of good lessons for Photoshop on you-tube, just search for what you're after. Good phrases are "Photoshop Text Wrap" and "Photoshop Variables".

While Photoshop is wonderful to use, you could basically achieve the same results in publisher, paint, power-point or gimp. For simple text layout work there are other applications which do the job just as well... meaning you can really do it yourself and save a few hundred pounds.

Honestly, there are companies out there charging a fortune for what's basically GCSE level DT work which can be done on equipment most people have at home already. End of rant.