When looking at the budget and various quotes, our Save the Dates, Wedding Invitations, and RSVPs was a line we knew we could cut down on costs and designed our own. I was looking forward to designing our own Save the Dates and Invitations since I love doing that already. The majority of people cannot, and it makes sense to have someone else design them, and that’s ok. For us, it was about using our resources and talents to apply funds to other parts of the wedding.
For our save the dates, we opted in for a simple, photo postcard. I pondered on whether or not to email save the dates. Part of me was like, hell yes. But the other side was saying, what about the people who do not email or what happens if it goes to spam or how does one collect all of those emails?
While I love a hard copy – especially if it’s useful as look up to our fridge and see John & Kate’s hanging out – in hindsight, I think I would have emailed Save the Dates and used an animated GIF, similar to the one we used on our wedding website.
For the invitations, however, this is where I’m “old school” or “traditional” – I love the idea of a hard copy, something to hang on to, and for Fatima’s scrapbook. Still, a part of me wanted to send a virtual invitation. For that to happen, I’d need it to be spectacular. Simple, but full of motion, great graphics, and ended up in everyone’s inboxes.
Instead, I purused Pinterest for invitation pinspiration and pulled together a combination of a few ideas in Photoshop. However, before beginning, I needed to know where we were going to print them so I knew my limits and export specs. We ended up printing with SmartPress.
For the RSVPs, we decided to go green and accept them on our wedding website in an effort to cut down on paper and overall time. The plugin we used was awesome! We could link guests to each other, so that if one person, like my aunt was RSVP-ing, my Nana was linked to her and could RSVP on her behalf. You could take food preferences, allergies, and custom questions. And the best part? It all exported into a report. One thing to note: quadruple check the spelling of your guests’ names. When you think you’ve checked them three times, there’ll be one (or two) people with an inverted letter in their name.
