Weddings are expensive. Like really, REALLY expensive.
It’s not at all difficult to spend $20,000 or more – and sometimes much more – on a single wedding day and everything that you need to plan and execute your perfect wedding, and prices only continue to rise as time goes by.
This is why it should come as no surprise to anyone that those planning weddings are always looking for ways to cut costs without having to cut corners, and thanks to home printing technology in the widespread supply of high quality paper and stationary at affordable prices more and more people are choosing to design and print out their own wedding invitations.
This alone can often help people save upwards of $1000 or more, making it a really smart move – especially considering the fact that few (if any) of your guests are going to be able to tell that you printed out your invitations on your own if you take advantage of the tips and tricks we include below.
Let’s dive right in!
The top 5 tips and tricks for printing your own wedding invitations
Make sure your printer and your ink is up for the task
The first thing that you have to do when you are getting ready to print out your own wedding invitations is make sure that you have the hardware necessary for the task at hand.
A $30 inkjet from the early 2000’s probably isn’t going to cut it, but that doesn’t mean that you need a $3000 laser printer or specialty photo printer to get the job done right, either.
No, you’ll want to get your hands on (or verify that you already have) a high-quality inkjet printer that takes advantage of dye based ink, and inkjet printer that can produce high resolution images time after time without any degradation and is also capable of printing on high quality card stock or stationary without wasting too much ink, either.
If you don’t have a quality printer is a good idea to ask around or even check if work has something that you could use, even if you have to reimburse them for the ink that you end up using.
Paper is critical
The next thing that you have to do when you are getting ready to print your own wedding invitations is find high quality paper that is going to feel perfect in the hand while accepting whatever it is you want to print on the paper at the exact same time.
There are literally dozens and dozens of different kinds of paper available on the market today in a variety of different sizes and weights – not to mention colors – so it’s a good idea to go down to a specialty stationery store and actually get your hands on different papers to find one that has the characteristics you are looking for.
If you’re going to go heavy on the imagery on your invitations, you’ll want to choose something that offers sharp contrast to the colors that you will be using. If you’re going to go heavy on the text and the typography of your invitations, something creamier may be a smarter choice.
Price out your invitations ahead of time and adjust accordingly
Now that you figured out whether or not you have the right hardware to get the job done and have found a couple of different paper types that you are interested in using it’s time to begin pricing out your individual invitations to find out what your budget is and whether or not you need to adjust to get under that figure.
Think about all of the invitations that you are going to need to send out and then determine exactly how many invitations you will be able to print, cut, and fold out of the paper that you are thinking about purchasing. It should be really easy to price this out once you know what your options are, and you’ll be able to weigh whether or not spending a little more money is worth the better paper or the better printing or whether you want to go with a budget based and more no-frills kind of option.
Calibrate your screen and your designs
Now that you have the money side of things out of the way, it’s time to begin the actual designing of your wedding invitations – and there’s a couple of things you need to do before you jump right in.
For starters, you need to calibrate your screen for color balance using the built-in software that all modern operating systems include or downloading free software you can read from a variety of sources online. This will make sure that the colors you see on the screen are the exact colors that will be printed out, a huge advantage when you’re creating something as important as a wedding invitation.
Secondly, you need to make sure that your designs are sized correctly so that they can be printed out on the paper you are using with as little waste and as little “overage” as possible. Really think about the sizes of your invitations and make sure that the design has been sized appropriately before you even think about printing.
Hire someone to create the design for you and print everything on your own
There are a lot of websites out there with graphic designers offering their expertise and their services at discount prices, giving you the opportunity to have professional artists custom create your wedding invitations for you (for next to nothing) with you handling the actual printing and fulfillment of the project on your own end.
This is definitely a savvy way to go if you want to make sure that you get the best possible designs for your wedding invitations without spending a small fortune, and is the only way to go if you want a wedding invitation that is anything but “cookie-cutter” the way that most wedding invitation in a box options are.
Hopefully now you feel more confident about producing your own wedding invitations and printing them out all on your own!
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