Wedding Invitation Critique/Ideas

[thatitalian]

So,

I found a printer! Turns out my other half has a cousin who is best friends with a guy who owns a printers - sorted!

Now, onto the invites! I want something very different with a vintage feel.

So, I am calling in all ideas and any assitance! I trying to think of ideas, sizes, layouts, styles, etc.

Let the help begin!

Original Post:

Hopefully someone on here can help me (or indeed maybe knows a printer!)...

I am trying to get my wedding invitations printed.

There are four postcards (eight sides) in total.

1. Front
2. Main Invite
3. Church Info
4. Hotel Info
5. Reply Card Front
6. Reply Card Back
7. Wedding Day Time-line
8. Traditions (still being designed - but will follow this format)

There is also a holder that will wrap around the postcards to keep each set together.

I'm looking for a letterpress style (deboss) on all invitations including text with the front to include deboss foil blocking on the "&" in a rustic silver.

Can anyone recommend a printer (pref in the UK)? If the price is right am happy to get them from the US!

I've  attached some of them to show you size and design style.

THANKS!

[hypernova]

Whew...5.5 hours of dancing...I don't know customs in England, but I doubt people will be dancing that long.

Congratulations on the impending wedding!  It sounds snazzy!

[philharris]

First post - but at least it's something I have direct experience of.
Foil stamping is damn expensive in the UK. In the end I bought a machine and did it myself. We went for a foil border and printed text (which meant that we only needed one stamp), and used the border on:
Save the date;
Invitations;
Orders of service;
Place cards;
Thank you cards.

We also used the design printed on some other stuff like banners and direction signs (these came from Vista Print, whom I can recommend, but you need to pay a few pounds over the headline price on their website by the time you include custom images etc)

All of the printing we did was on A6 stock/A5 folded to make booklets. The stamp (126x84mm) cost about £80 (inc vat) from www.colourfoil.co.uk.  If you are stamping a lot of different things then the price is going to rocket quite quickly - you could be looking at £500 just for the stamps. You could google hot foil printers or hot foil stamping for an idea of printers - I found that lots of them wanted much higher minimum quantities than you could ever possibly want for a wedding.

[thatitalian]

hypernova: Lol. There are speeches and a candy buffet included in that time so it will only really be 4 hours of dancing. It is a Greek/Italian - believe me there will be lots of dancing!

EDIT: And thanks for the congrats!

philharris: Thanks for that! I am only foiling the "&" on the front invitation, so I could get away with one stamp also and it would only need to be 60x30mm tops! How easy is it to foil?

The thing I really want is the debossing! I would love to have plain white A6 textured card with all the bits in purple bits debossed - gives the invite a real professional feel.

[CCM]

http://www.elopement-packages.com/

[philharris]

I think (but happy to be corrected) that you will still need a die/stamp to deboss print - the difference as I understand it is this:

Embossed printing: the die is inked, and the print is formed by the die making a dent in the card, and at the same time the ink transfers from the die to the card.
Foil stamping: a hot die pushes the foil onto the card, which makes a dent and the foil is left behind.

This looks like the sort of place that would do it:
http://www.blog.blushpublishing.co.uk/category/wedding-stationery/

The foiling is relatively straightforward once you get going, but we had trouble finding card that would take the foil successfully - we used a heavy photo paper style card which worked well. We found that more textured cards had a higher failure rate.

[thatitalian]

Hahaha, I have already contacted them. They don't do foil blocking but they do letterpress.

This thing is open to changes - depends on cost. I do not want to spend £1k on invites!

I am not 100% happy with some of the cards though. I will upload them tonight for critique!!!

[thatitalian]

Lol, hahaha, if only! Funny thing is I think Katerina would agree with you!

My brother has this theory that if you get really nice invites people think you are posh and so have to get you a posh gift.

I just have a love for design and want to make something personal for the day. The reality is that not everyone will appreciate it, most will even throw them away, but if one person does appreciate it then I will be happy.

[shateredsoul1979]

We started dancing at about... 4  (we had a lunch instead of dinner) the dancing ended at 11pm. Seriously ppl, you guys need to know how to party.

It was more like 5 hours when you consider the speeches, and all that jazz.

So before my wedding,  I told my bro and another groomsmen about my thoughts about doing a prank on my wife. They thought my idea was great so they went and got me the biggest brown undies they could find, stuffed it in my sleeve, and I took it out while under the dress when getting her garter. It turned out really funny, and my wife didn't kill me. We threw the undies out after the garter.

Just be cool and calm no matter what. Our priest was flying in from Venezuela (he's been in her family since she was little), and we found out he wouldn't be able to make it the day before (all flights were cancelled due to the weather). Also, the night of the wedding, after the wedding, we had to go help a friend who was caught driving drunk. Yeah... good times! Still, the hardest part was getting the groomsmen to focus during the pictures. Man, they were so drunk (2 ran off to play basketball against some kids at the park).

hypernova: Lol. There are speeches and a candy buffet included in that time so it will only really be 4 hours of dancing. It is a Greek/Italian - believe me there will be lots of dancing!

EDIT: And thanks for the congrats!

philharris: Thanks for that! I am only foiling the "&" on the front invitation, so I could get away with one stamp also and it would only need to be 60x30mm tops! How easy is it to foil?

The thing I really want is the debossing! I would love to have plain white A6 textured card with all the bits in purple bits debossed - gives the invite a real professional feel.

[hypernova]

Greek/Italian weddding.  In England.  Just a few more countries, and you'll have all of Europe!

Weddings in my family are usually smallish, so dancing doesn't last too long.  But if there's other things during that time, then I can understand the time frame. 

Just leave some energy for afterwards.  winkwink. 

[shateredsoul1979]

Greek/Italian weddding.  In England.  Just a few more countries, and you'll have all of Europe!

Weddings in my family are usually smallish, so dancing doesn't last too long.  But if there's other things during that time, then I can understand the time frame. 

Just leave some energy for afterwards.  winkwink. 

ha ha

yeah, we had 150 ppl, and I still had ppl telling me bringing up that we didn't invite them. *shrug* Congrats man!

[thatitalian]

Hahahaha, actually you spelt it incorrectly. the language is called English...

[philharris]

I don't have anything particular to offer on the design other than general points:

One of the benefits of designing your own stationary is having something that fits the theme of the wedding exactly. You can also have a consistent design across all aspects of the stationary and the table plan so you should do this as it will look much better than everything being different. It is as well to try and get rough designs of all items done now so that you can see how the design works across different sizes of paper etc.

The colour of the printing should tie into the colour scheme for the day - eg match it to the bridesmaids' dresses or the flowers.

Instead of a lot of inserts to the invitation, we put a website up with directions, details of nearby hotels etc. You could move the information about parking etc to a website and just have a map of the reception venue.

Are you likely to have people driving from outside London? If so you probably need to help them out a bit more on parking - eg if the wedding is on a week day then the congestion charge apply, how long can you park on the single yellow lines for, how much the car parks cost - this would be a nasty shock for anyone not used to paying for parking in London. I would think about providing directions from the church to the hotel as well - not just 'turn onto Harewood Avenue' but 'Harewood Avenue is the sixth turning after Madame Tussards, you need to be in the right hand lane'. A lot of this area is one way streets so it can get quite stressfull turning around if you miss a turning (speaking from very bitter experience here and I drive through Marylebone a lot - actually I don't think you can turn right into Harwood from Marlybone Road). If everyone is from London however, then leave them to it...

This probably doesn't apply to you but in a traditional British wedding you wouldn't have reply cards - the correct form is for guests to send a handwritten reply on note paper.

And since we are also talking about how long they last, my wedding was at 11am, the reception started at 2pm (they were some distance apart), and the last guests went to bed at 4am the next day.....