Wedding invitations online - templates and wording

The formats a wedding invitation comes in

Counted honestly there are five — and most couples end up with two: a main one for sending out and a backup for the guests who prefer it that way.

• An invitation page on its own link. It opens in the browser on any phone and holds the day's timetable, a map, the dress code and a reply form. The date or the address can be fixed after you've sent it — the link stays the same.
• A picture in a messenger. Quick and free, but only names, date and address fit on it: everything else guests end up asking you in private. And it sinks in the chat within a week.
• A printed card from a print shop. Lovely in the hand and right for a small wedding where invitations are given in person. But there's the print run, the envelopes, the delivery — and one typo costs you a whole new run.
• A PDF you print yourself. The compromise: the layout comes together online and the printing happens at the copy shop round the corner, on heavy paper if you like. Works when there are twenty guests and you'll see all of them before the day.
• A video invitation. Striking, and slow to make; as your only format it doesn't hold up — nobody wants to copy an address and a time out of a clip, so it needs a text alongside it anyway.

How to pick the format for your wedding

Start not from what looks nicest but from how your guest list is built. Four questions settle the choice almost every time.

How many people. Up to twenty and you can afford paper and hand every one over in person. From fifty upwards the delivery turns into a two-week project of its own, and a digital invitation wins on time alone.

Where they're travelling from. If half your guests are coming from another city they need more than the date and the address — they need the journey, somewhere to stay and what time to arrive. None of that fits on a card; you need a page you can add to.

How long until the date. A print shop, with layout and delivery, is two to three weeks at the very least. With a month to go there isn't much of a choice.

Whether you need replies. Past thirty guests, “who's coming” stops fitting in your head. A format where the answer arrives on its own saves you dozens of messages.

Invitation templates: choosing a style

Guests read the style before the words: it tells them in advance whether this is dinner by candlelight or a party till sunrise. So pick it to suit the venue and the mood of the day rather than your taste in the abstract.

Classic — for a celebration in a restaurant or a manor house with plenty of guests of every age. Minimal — for a loft and a small gathering. Botanical and watercolour — for an outdoor ceremony and for summer. Dark modern themes — for a party everyone's turning up to in black.

From here it's easier to go by eye: the collections are grouped by mood, and inside each one you can see how a template works as a whole.

What to write in an invitation: the short version

The text rests on five things and everything else is decoration on top: who's getting married, on what date, what time to arrive, where exactly, and by when to reply.

Here's how to test a finished text: give it to someone who knows nothing about your plans. If they can tell you the date, the time and the place from memory, it's ready to send.

There are two extremes people tend to fall into. Too dry: “Nina and Arthur. 6 June, 4 pm, The Pomegranate” — fine for a chat, but it reads like a line out of a calendar. Too long: three paragraphs about how you met with the address right at the bottom — half of them never read that far.

The workable middle is four or five lines with one living sentence among them: “Katie and Tom are getting married on 6 June. We argued about the format for weeks and settled on one thing: what matters is who's at the table. Come to The Pomegranate, 12 Garden Street, at 4 pm. Please let us know by 10 May.”

If what you need is a ready text rather than the principles — twenty versions for different occasions are collected in a separate piece: formal ones, warm ones, short ones for messengers, ones for parents and ones for friends.

Who gets which invitation

Guests are never all the same, and holding to one format for all hundred of them is stubbornness for its own sake. The list usually splits itself into three.

The main part — friends, colleagues, people your own age. They get the link in a message, and it's the calmest option going: the page opens straight away and the reply comes from the same place.

Older relatives. They'll open the link too, but many of them would rather hold an invitation — print the page out or make a couple of paper cards in the same style and hand them over yourself. Those are the five minutes people thank you for separately.

The best man, the parents, the closest few. They're usually told out loud and the invitation follows later, as a reminder with the details. Here a personal word matters more than the design.

The invitation isn't the only printed thing at a wedding

People remember this late, though the style is easier to settle once and for all. Beyond the invitation itself a couple usually needs three more things.

A save-the-date — a short message three or four months ahead if guests are travelling: just the names and the day, so people have time to book their tickets. The full invitation comes later.

A reminder a couple of days before, with the exact time and address. It needs no design of its own, yet it's somehow always the one that gets forgotten, and half the guests ring you that morning.

Print for the day itself: menus, the seating plan, table numbers, place cards. They're made in the same styling as the invitation — and the names on them come from your guest list instead of being typed out by hand.