Holidays are just around the corner. If you’re part of the group of folks who love organizing festive parties, then now is the time to start preparing for those holiday invites! This season will be brimming indeed with theme parties, cocktail events, and family get-togethers.
Once you’ve narrowed down the date, caterer, location, and theme, it’s time to finalize your guest invitations. While the process can be distressing at first, this part of the event planning can likewise be fun! In designing your invites, you get to choose photos, themes, color palettes, typography, and other style details.
Remember that crafting holiday invitations needs thorough preparation and planning. Most of all, you don’t need professional skills to design beautiful invites. And to help you create your holiday cards, here are eleven tips for crafting your holiday invitations.
- Pick Your Card Size
Different events require varying card size. Below you will find popular sizes for invitation cards:
- 5×7 inches (classic invite)
- 3.5×5 inches (RSVP invite)
- 5.5×7.5 inches (large invite)
- 4.5×5.5 inches (reply card)
- 4×9.25 inches (thin invite)
- Start Crafting In Advance
Creating a well-designed invitation needs ample time for preparation and attention. Thus, it’s best to design early to avoid rushing your work and give people time to plan.
When deciding on illustration, color scheme, typography, and layout, it’s best to give yourself a broad timeframe to consider your options.
- Choose Your Color Scheme
Our instinct usually helps us choose colors every time. We see how the varying shades relate to one another and how they appear when combined with another pattern. When crafting your holiday invite, remember to stick to a solid color scheme that will incorporate all your design concepts and establish your card’s tone.
Hence, refrain from selecting colors haphazardly. The color scheme characterizes the personality of your invitation. For instance, you can choose bright palettes to go with holiday festivities and birthday parties, while muted palettes will work nicely with formal events like weddings.
- Know Your Style
The unique style you pick for your invite dramatically impacts the whole presentation of your card. Setting the right tone for your card may be daunting; however, there are a variety of paths you can choose.
To help you narrow down your option, you can set up a mood board to allow you to see different creative styles, schemes, and typography that will suit your card.
- Explore Customized Templates
A fast way to kickstart your design journey is with a ready-made invitation template. This method is beneficial in case you’re clueless about crafting invitations.
With an online template, you can select various illustrations and designs, but you can still personalize it by editing the color scheme and text.
- Select Premium Fonts
Another element that plays a vital role in your holiday card is the font you choose to convey your event. When making your invites, it is essential to use premium fonts. Each font triggers distinct moods or feelings, like you feel a certain casual vibe when using sans serif fonts or giving off a notion of elegance when using script fonts.
However, you must avoid being font-happy. Thus, make sure to use three or fewer fonts to keep your invitation readable. Applying too many fonts will make your invite seem overly loud that it overwhelms the celebration information. And while there are countless free font sites you can find on the internet, there are chances you’ll encounter lousy designed ones. See to it that you look for credible sites where you can generate your premium fonts.
- Avoid Crowding Your Design
When designing your invite, remember to refrain from crowding your card. Negative space is a fundamental element in design that enables the reader to appreciate the whole invitation minus the overpowering emotion. With that said, don’t forget to include blank spaces in between photos or text.
Center aligning your design is likewise advisable when creating your card. Since an invite typically carries short phrases, justifying the details will make it appear unbalanced. To save up space in your invitation, you can also use ampersands instead of the word “and”. Utilizing ampersands adds appeal and character to your invite.
Of course, designing a card is more than just styling an invitation. Remember that you’re crafting an invite in the first place to inform family, friends, and relatives about an upcoming event. Party details should be clear and visible. The style and size you choose should be neat and easily viewed, so avoid using condensed or loopy typefaces. Also, the background color should always be a direct contrast to your text color for easy reading.
- Add A Handmade Touch and Images
Photos, whether personal or simple illustrations, can make your invite more intimate and unique. You can include private photos or flat lay images you can find online to make your card creative. While you can directly print them yourself, others who are rushing find it more beneficial to hire professionals to print them.
Other handmade touches you can include in your card to give it an extra flair is to infuse some watercolor swirls on them or individually address your envelopes with calligraphy. In case you decide to insert personal touches on your invitations, don’t forget to leave space on your card or envelope for these details.
- Bring In Texture
Printing your card on a simple flat paper will appear dull without some final polishing. You can include some dimensions to a lackluster layout by adding embossing, letterpress, or debossing to fix this issue.
Letterpress printing creates an imprint of images or text on the card with or without ink. Embossed printing leaves raised patterns on the invitation, while debossed printing depresses patterns on the surface. These additional components may cause you extra bucks; however, incorporating them on a sparsely designed invitation can be worth it.
- Be Mindful of Your Wording
When writing your invitation, it is best to keep your reader in mind. To avoid hurting anyone, you must value your visitor’s spiritual affiliation. Often, people readily assume everyone observes Christmas. In case you will be inviting guests with varying religious affiliations, then it’s better to stick with standard wording like “festive party”,” holiday celebration”, or “wonderful time of the year”.
- Use Top-Quality Paper
While focusing on the design of your card is integral, selecting the type of paper to use is likewise important. The card you choose supplies the texture and foundation for your invitation.
Ordinarily, holiday cards use plain cardstock; however, you can select from other varieties such as textured linen or translucent vellum.
Leave a Reply