Stress Free Wedding Invites

Wedding invites. They may appear to be a straightforward task when it comes to planning your big day, but a quick browse of Pinterest will soon reveal that designing your invites (which, let’s face it, help to set the tone for the entire wedding) and delivering them to your nearest and dearest can actually be quite overwhelming. There are so many options that go far beyond deciding who to invite, such as style, colour and content, that this job can often be a taste of the obstacles to come throughout your wedding planning journey.

Thankfully, our creative BCME vendor, Louma Bardawil of Design by Louma, has given us her five top tips to ensure that producing your wedding invites is a fun and enjoyable process. By following Louma’s suggestions below, you will be sure to avoid any invite-related pitfalls and begin to create a style that will be carried forward to your big day.

Order extra prints

This is something that I recommend to my clients every time. Think about it; by the time you get married, you and your partner will have made new friends and perhaps even formed new business relationships. At the very last minute, you might want to consider inviting these new friends and acquaintances to your wedding. In addition to this, when some guests let you know early that they cannot make your big day, you may wish to invite more friends or members of your extended family. Having spare invites to hand is always useful.

Something else to consider is that when we place an order for invitations we order special papers that come in packs rather than sheets, so ordering extra prints might be only a few dirhams extra if the printer will be using the whole pack of paper. If you order extra prints quite late in the process, the printer might charge you for the whole order again as they will have to start the process all over again using a new pack of paper.

Pick an existing design to save time, effort and money

The ready made invitation is an invitation whose design files, printing files and production plates are ready to be amended and re-used. When you design a new invitation, you have to account for the extra hours put in to research, design, sharing the design, receiving feedback, getting the approval, preparing printing files and producing the new invitation. Those hours are all billable.

Another advantage to picking an existing design is that you get to see the finished product during the first consultation, meaning that you have an idea of the finished product from the very beginning. Most stationery designers will accept amendments to colours or layouts, and in that way you get to “personalise” it and make it your own.

It’s YOUR wedding, so put your brand on it

Creating your couples’ monogram gives you your very own wedding signature and will help to give everything a feeling of unity on your wedding day. You can make it sophisticated with your own seal and even place meaningful icons around it, or keep it simple with a nice calligraphic font. You can have the monogram on the ceremony runway, the favours, the cake and the goodie bags…… but remember not to over do it.

Get personal when addressing your invites

Another way to make your invitations personal is to loosen up the formality and be creative when you write your guests’ names. I am sure that your best friend would love to receive her invitation addressed as “to the one who has always been there for me”, or your parents will appreciate much more if you write “to Mum and Dad, from your loving daughter,” rather than the standard “Mr & Mrs”. Be creative, have fun with it and think of the emotional relationship you have with that person. This doesn’t mean that the whole guest list needs to be informal, but the people who are close to your heart will definitely appreciate that intimacy.

Select your colour palette

If you don’t want to go for a theme you can keep it simple with a colour palette made up of three colours. Spend some time researching the existing common colours available from the different wedding vendors; tableware, bridesmaid dresses, invitations, favours, and even flower colours. This will give you a strong visual colour statement on your day and facilitate your negotiation with the different vendors involved, as they know what they have in their inventory and can help you source it if it’s not available. You can print this colour palette on small cards and bring them with you to every meeting.

All stationery in the images above were designed and created by Design by Louma. To visit Design by Louma’s Bride Club ME profile click here, or visit their website here.