Invites

More about our invites.

As mentioned, these ended up being a lot of work for us. Dina and I decided that we didn’t want the usual impersonal invites that you find on the many wedding sites out there. We also didn’t want to pay out the nose for custom invites. And we didn’t want to burden any of our graphic designers friends with this project (though Becky offered, and she did a GREAT job on the save the dates).

So we decided to go the DIY route. Both of us would generate ideas and I’d execute in Photoshop.

Now, although the term “designer” is in my job title, I’m not a graphic designer. My job is to make user interface elements – software, essentially. I think about the functional, not the pretty. And before this project, I’d never designed anything for print. But Dina and I decided to give it the old college try despite our shortcomings. And I do have some good applicable knowledge of typography, layout, etc. (again, as they apply to the web and software, however). So we spent a solid weekend and several weekday evenings designing – far more hours than I would’ve liked, admittedly. But we’re happy with what came out. This:

Becky ended up handling the printing side in the end, mostly because of time pressures on my end, as well as a not being able to speak the right language. So once again I’m indebted to her.

(Also, I added the border just now; we did a full-bleed on white and then mounted the invites on 5×7 cards. Paper Zone!) We sent out two different versions of RSVP cards as well:

Each of the RSVP cards has a different URL (obscured here to protect from internet trolls trying to RSVP for my wedding), corresponding to whether or not you get a +1. RSVPs are being handled via Forms in Google Docs.  (It’s 2010!)

Finally, we included a photo. A goofy one. We printed these at Walgreens via Shutterfly – which blew my mind. SO cheap – much more so than the $5/photo that photographers often try and charge. And we wrapped everything up in a ribbon. Oh, AND we bought a custom embosser for the envelopes. emBOSS indeed!

So, that’s that. They’re out. PHEW.

A few lessons learned, for those of you doing DIY:

• However much time you think it will take you to do this: double it.
• Before you pick an invite size, make sure its a standard size that can be mailed USPS without metering (unless you want to cart them all to the post office and forgo stamps).
• Design your invites at exact size they’ll be printed at 300 DPI.
• Full bleed (color all the way to edges) cost more.
• In Photoshop, turn off image compression to make sure any bitmapped elements you use (photos, for example) don’t end up with printed compression artifacts.
• Web-based RSVPs will save on time trying to collect responses. But think about how many of your guests are computer-challenged before going this route.
• Shutterfly and other cheap online photo printing services do a good-enough job of photo printing for a fraction of the price that photographers charge.
• In Seattle we used AlphaGraphics, and they did an excellent job.
• In all, we estimate that we saved hundreds upon hundreds of dollars compared to hiring a graphic designer. But we probably didn’t save any money compared to buying stock invitations from a place like Wedding Paper Divas.

Finally, do you want to see some invite idea discards? I’m sure you do. We worked through a ton of ideas. Some were decent; others were kind of crappy. Some of these took five minutes and were immediately tossed. But I have no ego when it comes to this as hey, graphic design ain’t my gig. So, here: