Congratulations! The choice of life partner and decision to marry is one of the most important decisions of your life. Of course, you want to share the occasion with your loved ones. Planning a wedding is likely one of the most expensive adventures you will ever face.

Designing your own custom wedding invitations suite is an excellent way to save money and make your wedding even more personal. The results can be professional quality and perfectly tied in with your wedding colors, flowers, and theme. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to design your own wedding invitations.

Before designing your wedding invitations, start with a brainstorming session. Make a list of every adjective you want in your invitations. Should they be elegant? Contemporary? Casual? Write it down. Formal or playful? Minimalist or elaborate? Don’t spend time deciding or analyzing at first, just list every quality you might like. Include your fiancé’s input.

Once you have listed every adjective you like for the invitations, start adding the graphics you might like. Flowers, fleur-de-lis, hearts, cowboys, dinosaurs? I won’t judge — and neither should you at this stage. Maybe you and your betrothed share a favorite hobby or song. Add it to the list.

Once you have an exhaustive list of all the qualities you might like to include in your wedding invitations, it is time to review and start honing the list. Starting with broad ideas and contributions from you both will help ensure your custom wedding invitations truly represent you both. You can carry the same design theme through your wedding invitation suite and your wedding signs.

Make another list with all the information that the wedding invitation should include. Include the following:

• The hosts’ names
• The couple’s names
• The date and time of the ceremony
• Ceremony location
• The date and time of the reception
• Reception location
• Attire details
• Guest name
• Guest address
• Return address
• Wedding website (optional)
• Entree preference (optional)
• Date for RSVP return
• Directions to the venue (optional)
• Any additional information about the venue (optional)

Again, include everything on this list you feel is important to communicate with your wedding invitations. In the next step, you’ll decide the inclusions and the wedding invitation suite.

With all the information your guests need, a single wedding invitation card would become too cluttered. That’s how the wedding invitation suite was born. The suite includes every paper piece that is included with the invitation itself.

A wedding invitation suite typically includes:

• Invitation
• RSVP card and envelope
• Mailing envelope
• Postage

Optional elements include:

• Inner envelope
• Reception card (includes information for receptions held at a location different from the ceremony)
• Directions to both events
• Weekend events card (for additional events)
• Accommodations cards (if you are arranging accommodations for out-of-town guests)
• Invitation wrapper (silk ribbon, belly band, etc. for holding all wedding invitation pieces neatly together)

Using the style from Step 1 and the information gathered in Step 2, decide what items to include in your wedding invitation suite. Typically, the more formal the style, the more separate pieces of the invitation suite are included.

Deciding what your wedding invitations should say begins with who is hosting the wedding. Is it your parents? In that case, you might say, “Thomas and Cassandra request your presence…” or, depending upon the theme you chose in Step 1, “Tom and Cassie invite you…” or even “The family of Bride…”

The way you word your custom wedding invitations will be informed by the style decisions you made in Step 1. That is how you’ll decide how formally or casually you want to present your information. And your choices in Step 3 will let you know what information to include in the wedding invitation. All the information your guests will need must be included in the invitation unless you will have another inclusion that communicates it.

Steps 1-4 of designing wedding invitations are largely fact-finding and decision-making. Now, for the fun stuff! While there will be more decisions to make, this is where the creativity flows, and you can make your custom wedding invitations truly reflect you as a couple.

What colors will you include on your custom wedding invitations? What graphics would you like to use? And perhaps most important — what font will you use?

Always remember that the most essential purpose of your wedding invitations is to communicate essential information. So, they must be readable. Some formal or script fonts are so decorative, they are difficult to read, so bear that in mind when you make your font choices. You may want to consider a combination of fonts (no more than 2-3) to best convey the appearance you want and to ensure that it is legible.

Play with the layout of your text, the colors, and the graphics you love.

You can absolutely design your own wedding invitations from soup to nuts. However, after Step 5, you have done all the heavy lifting, right? So, if you decide you’d like some professional assistance with the design details and execution, that’s totally OK. You can even get the assistance of a professional graphic artist working to perfect your custom wedding invitations — for free!

When you get your wedding invitations printed on cardstock by Printmoz, you can have our professional design team help you with your design! It’s easy to develop tunnel vision, and to get stuck on some of the design details, so it’s great to be able to get a professional to take a fresh look. For instance, perhaps a single, large, semi-transparent graphic behind your text would better embrace your theme instead of many tiny rosebuds or butterflies.