How can I make simple yet elegant wedding invitations?

by Melissa
(Huntsville, Texas)

I really want to create elegant wedding invitations. My wedding colors are navy blue, yellow, and gray. We are using mixed colored daisies and some tulips. I want to make the wedding invitations myself but how can I make them look like it was not made by a 5 year old?
Answer:

The reason that you are worried about your invitations looking like they were made by a child is that most people find it hard to create illustrations and elegant writing themselves.

If this is your concern then here are some ideas. Use professional looking images and fonts. Both are widely available for free or at very low cost on the internet.

Dingbats
I have found a few examples of dingbat tulips and daisies that you could use. The examples above are from fontspace.com and are the dingbat HFF Floral Stencil by Have Fun with Fonts and RM Country by Renny Murray (personal use only).

Find out more about how to download and use dingbats.

Images
You can buy low cost images from www.istockphoto.com or www.dreamstime.com. The cost of the images start from about $1 and you can use them on your invitation. If you're going to print them out, then make sure you get a 'large' image that is at least 200dpi. This is a high resolution and will ensure that it doesn't look pixelated.

A few other tips you may want to consider:
Use color sparingly. It's easy to go overboard with colour. Stick with the three colors you mentioned. Choose one of yours to be the main colour of the invite and then use the other two as accent colours. Too many images and too much color will make your invitations look tacky and badly designed.

Keep the images close to your theme, so choose daisies or tulips. For example, have simple invitations with elegant black writing, then use 3 images of daisies and tulips in yellow, grey and navy blue. Or use navy blue writing with simple grey tulips and white or yellow daisies.

Alternatively if you want to be craftier, you can buy small packs of paper tulips from craft stores or online, these can easily be stuck onto pre printed elegant wedding invitations.
See our design Calla lilly invitations for an example of how this technique would work.

There are also a couple of other invitation designs on Wedding Invitation Ideas with tulips, a tall modern tulip invitation or you could create traditional elegant wedding invitations with tulips.

You could use one of those or use it as a base for your ideas. Just adapt it to what you need.

I hope that helps.