Wedding Invitation Design Mistakes & How to Avoid Them
The origin story of Crissie Vitale Creative starts with the story of my own wedding invitations.
I had always been a big fan of gorgeous paper, so when it came time to plan the invitations for our wedding, I knew I wanted something unique that really reflected what our wedding was going to be. Invitations are the first tangible experience your guests have with your wedding - and I knew (even back then!) how important that was!
But everywhere I looked for invites I came out disappointed. Things were either too generic, too expensive, or just poorly designed. I decided the only way to get them right was to do them myself, turns out I was right - and wrong, in a lot of ways.
Let’s start on a positive note!
WHAT I DID RIGHT:
I worked with a designer for our monogram.
I knew I wanted a central element that would live across our wedding paper and signage. I wanted it to be unique, and was not confident in my own artistic abilities at that point (I still believed the myth that if you had bad handwriting you wouldn’t be good at calligraphy). So I had Mel Chiusano design that piece for me.
I cared about details.
I wanted all the bells and whistles to make our invites truly special. Paper weight was super important to me (and still is!) having envelope liners, varied card sizes, a way to hold the suite together and euro-flap (non-white) envelopes were all on my must have list.
I committed the time.
I spent ALL of my free time working on these. From designing, to sourcing paper and envelopes, to problem solving (keep reading for the problems!!), to assembling (Liners! Twine! Double envelopes!), to hand addressing every envelope (oh, AND learning calligraphy first), the time commitment to get these right was huge. This helped me realize WHY custom invitations cost what they do. You not only pay for great design, but a lot of hard work and time! (Stay tuned for a blog post all about pricing!)
OK, now for the fun part.
LET’S TALK ABOUT WHAT I DID WRONG:
Over-ordered. By A LOT.
Let’s start with the Save the Dates.
First of all, I ordered enough Save the Dates for each individual person invited to the wedding to receive one instead of ordering one per household like I should have. I still have a HUGE stack of extra Save the Dates (as you can see in the photo on the left.)
Quick tip for you: A good way to estimate how many invitations you need is to divide your total guest count in half and add 25.
Didn’t start with a clear vision.
I also felt rushed sending these out - so I didn’t have a vision for the rest of the suite when I created them. Not 100% a bad thing - in my custom process I often design the Save the Dates months before the invitation suite, but I also have a good feel of there I want the rest of the design to go. Our save the dates were printed on a totally different color paper, and the foliage elements were a much brighter green than where I ended up for the rest of the suite. They still look like they are in the same family - but I wish they were a bit closer to the final look. Working with a designer for your full suite will help you keep a cohesive design from start to finish!
Had a few sizing snafus.
The 5x7 invitations I ordered from a cheap DIY site where I could upload my design were not actually 5x7 at all but 4.75 x 7.25. (In retrospect I should have caught this before I ordered when I had to resize my final art file - but I thought it was just some weird print file set-up thing, how was i to know any better!? The site said 5x7!)
Because of that extra .25 inches in length, my beautiful double-thick invite cards did not fit into the envelopes I had specially ordered from a different vendor. To solve this issue, I decided to re-order larger envelopes, which was cheaper than re-printing the cards and felt a lot safer than trying to evenly cut them all down to size. But since I was doing an inner and an outer envelope (like I said - I was all about the extras!!) I had to find new sizes for BOTH sets of envelopes! Ugh!