While I do believe in DIY-ing certain things for your wedding, I fully believe that your wedding invitations should not be one of them. Your Save the Dates and invitations are the first glimpse your guests get to see of your wedding before the big day, and you want to impress them! Your wedding stationery should account for 7-10% of your wedding budget, so you want to get it right! For example, if your total wedding budget is $15,000, your budget for wedding stationery would be between $1,000-$1,500.
You wedding stationery should be considered an investment in the biggest day of your life, and my advice is to leave it to the professionals. Below you'll find my top three reasons I believe you should hire a professional stationery designer for your wedding invitations and why it's worth the investment.
1 | THEY HAVE THE NECESSARY EXPERIENCE & DESIGN SKILLS
If you want your wedding stationery to be unique and to really make an impression with your guests, you need someone who has the experience and the skills to bring your vision to life. There are many things that go into making gorgeous invitations, such as fonts, graphics, custom calligraphy, creating a color palette, wording and etiquette, using design software, working with the printer, etc. A professional designer has the understanding, the skills and the experience to do all these things for you.
Everything your designer will consider for your invitations:
the right fonts and graphics
creating custom calligraphy (optional)
creating a gorgeous color palette
the right wording/etiquette for each piece of your suite
using the right design software
working with the printer
ordering the right amount of invitations
staying on budget
staying on top of the timeline for your invitation
+ a ton of other behind-the-scenes tasks I will cover in a later post!
2 | THEY WILL ENSURE THE QUALITY OF YOUR INVITATIONS
In my opinion, the quality of your invitations trump everything else on this list. There are so many things to consider to ensure the quality of your invitations, and not only do professional stationery designers have the skills and experience to design beautiful invitations for your wedding, they also are able to guarantee that your invitations are created using the best paper type, the right envelopes, printing techniques and color palette. They can also make recommendations on each of these things according to your budget, since they work closely and communicate with paper suppliers and printers on a daily basis.
Everything your designer will consider to ensure the quality of your invitations:
the right paper type
a great color palette that will print beautifully
the best printing method & techniques
making sure everything matches! (save the dates, invitation suite, envelopes, programs, menus, place cards, signage, etc.)
3 | THEY WILL SAVE YOU TIME
Everyone knows that planning a wedding is not easy, and definitely requires a lot of time. As a bride, you have a ton of things on your to-do list to get in order for your big day, and attempting to DIY your wedding stationery can turn into an extremely difficult and time-consuming (often money-consuming) task. Your wedding stationery is a very large task on that to-do list, so wouldn't it be nice to get that big item off of your list and let a professional handle it for you?
While it is important to stick to your wedding budget, and hiring a custom stationery designer is not cheap, DIY-ing your wedding stationery is almost always not a good idea. By hiring a wedding stationery designer, you'll be saving a ton of time (and probably tears!) from trying to create them yourself. They also can work with your budget and ensure that you're saving money on each of your wedding stationery pieces in all the right ways.
Stay tuned for next week's post about how to choose right wedding stationery designer!
Interested in hiring a wedding stationery designer? Let me know! I would love to hear from you and find out if we are good fit! :)
