Making Your Own Wedding Invitations

When Dan and I were getting married, we had a wedding budget set by my parents and when we saw what personalized wedding invitations cost, we were floored. We also knew we wanted to spend more of our budget on our photographer, location, food and DJ. In addition, I felt confident in my ability to design our own invitations with my experience using Adobe suite products and my past work in layout design in both college and high school.

We researched the style of invitation we liked and found that we both really liked the idea of vintage maps representing our childhoods and where we live today. I found inspiration online from another couple whose husband did the graphic design for their wedding and decided to get to work. I downloaded pages for my Macbook (a fraction of the cost of Adobe InDesign) and started working on layouts for invitations and response cards.

For our invitations I chose a vintage subway map of New York City from the 1930s, representing the location of the wedding and for the response cards a vintage map of Los Angeles from the 1950s. After I was satisfied with the design, I had the entire wedding party proof it for me and then brought the files to Kinkos to be printed. Then with my card stock copies at home, I cut each invitation by hand and then stuffed the envelopes over Easter with the help of my family. My Meme then addressed and sent all the invitations for me.

Here was the final result.

Photo by Courtney Dudley of Craig Paulson Photography

Photo by Courtney Dudley of Craig Paulson Photography

Recently, my friend Suzanne got married and as one of her wedding presents, I offered to design their wedding invitations for them as well as after she lamented to me the cost of invitations. I followed a similar model to my own invitations at request of the bride and am pretty stoked with how they came out.

Here was Suzanne and Mike's final result.

Photo by Reign7 Studios

I have to say if you are confident in graphic and layout design on a computer or have a friend who is, you can spend a tenth max of what personalized invites normally cost. You just have to be willing to dedicate the time to it (because it is labor intensive). Still the DIY wedding craft I am most proud of is our invitation suite.