For the couple choosing how the day looks
Type, colour and layout are not decoration. They decide whether your aunt can find the start time at arm's length in daylight, and whether the reply gets tapped or postponed. Here is what to look for.
Almost nobody opens your invitation on a laptop with a coffee. It is a phone, in a queue, on a small screen, often in sunlight, and the guest is looking for three things: who, when, where. A design that makes them scroll or pinch to find the time has failed while still looking beautiful on a printed proof.
That does not make the look irrelevant. It carries the register of the day: whether a guest expects a formal hall or a barbecue, black ties or muddy grass. Good invitation design does both jobs at once, saying something true about the wedding and getting the practical facts read in the first few seconds.
Treat the three as separate questions and the shortlist writes itself.
A display face can be lovely at forty point and unreadable at fourteen. Judge the body size and the spacing, not just the headline, and check that two long names do not need four lines.
Warm neutrals read calm, saturated colour reads festive. The honest test is legibility on glass in daylight, where pale grey on ivory turns decorative and then invisible.
Stack the facts the way guests want them: names and date, times and place, then the practical pages, then the reply. A layout that buries the schedule under a photograph is a portfolio piece, not an invitation.
The same wording should read well printed and on a link, because some guests will hold a card and most will hold a handset, and they should get the same day from each.
Run them on your own phone, in the room you are sitting in.
Identical information, two voices. The layout should carry the difference without hiding the facts.
Sophie Lindqvist and Anders Holm request the pleasure of your company at their marriage, on Saturday the twelfth of September at half past two. The address and the reply are one tap below.
We are getting married, and it is outside. Ceremony at two in the church on the hill, lunch at the farm afterwards. Come in shoes you can stand on grass in, and tell us by the end of June.
Weddings are one of the formats with a real multi-section site behind them: the invitation, the order of the day, venue and directions, a dress-code page, answers to the questions guests keep sending, and a gallery. Guests read the design, then use it. Every reply is recorded against a name, companions sit inside the limit you set, and meal choices arrive while the kitchen still has time to change a dish.
The useful consequence is that design and truth can stay separate. Choose the look now and let the changeable detail live on the page rather than in ink: if the arrival time moves by an hour, or an afternoon reception appears after the cards are printed, you revise the line once and everyone opening the link afterwards reads the corrected version. Help with wording is there if you want it, whether you draft with Clara on the web or describe the day to Jitabi on WhatsApp and edit what comes back. The site stays a draft until you publish, so a half-written invitation never reaches a guest.
How it works
Open a handful of designs from /templates and read each at arm's length. Anything that hides the time or the reply is out before it becomes precious to you.
Order of the day, directions, dress note, answers, reply. A pretty cover over empty structure is the mistake most couples make around month four.
Replace the placeholders with your names, times and places. Draft with Clara or Jitabi if the sentences are slow going, then edit them until they sound like you.
If a card is going in the post, put one QR or short link on it and keep the moving detail on the site, where one edit reaches everyone already holding a card.
Questions
Enough that you can read the date and time at arm's length without zooming. If a design only proves itself on a printed sheet, it is the guest on a handset who loses out.
They should share a tone and a palette rather than every pixel. Put the stable facts on the card and the changeable ones on the page, and let the link carry the difference.
Yes, or one short scroll away. Guests who have to hunt for it postpone it, and a postponed reply is the reason your numbers stay uncertain for weeks.
Assume guests see a range of screens, and do not let subtle shades carry meaning. Pale grey on ivory is a print trick; contrast is what survives small glowing glass in sunlight.
No. The design sets layout and palette; the text is yours to rewrite, so the same page can move from formal to friendly without anyone touching the structure.
Get Started
Legible type, honest contrast, a sensible reading order, and a reply within a thumb's reach. The look says what kind of wedding it is; the structure is what makes it useful.
