Contemporary Invitation Design

I came across this wedding invitation site today and I was flipping through their items for inspiration and I found a series of very modern and unique wedding invitations that I just had to share with all of you. Here is a quote from their website describing their rationale behind the invitation's design:

Celebrate the luxury of affordable designer wedding stationery. Modern, eco wedding invitations, save the date cards, ceremony programs, and thankyou notes are offered as do-it-yourself wedding kits, that you can print desktop, or we can print for you. Invitesite specializes in eco wedding invitations for Green Weddings

Giant Love, Tiny Footprint: Many of these Contemporary designs are made from treefree papers, handmade papers, fine European papers, and custom postconsumer recycled papers. All designs are exclusive to Invitesite: we design and manufacture our stationery in lovely Pasadena, CA. You can customize the designs by adding personal elements to make your wedding invitations truly one of a kind. For more hints and tips, visit our Green Weddings blog and the Articles section of Invitesite. We've been helping couples express themselves since 1995."

The designs are simple, textured, and reflect the current design trends in the past couple of years. These are excellent examples of modern wedding invitations and can serve as an example of the design trends behind these wedding greetings over the past ten years.

Tips For Choosing The Best Beach Wedding Invitations

While there are many great venues for the perfect wedding, from the local country club to the greenest and most luxurious park it is hard to beat the beauty and charm of a great beach wedding, and those planning such a wedding will of course want to make sure they choose not only the perfect beach, but also the perfect wedding invitations to get the word out about the big day. Long Island is one of the 'hot' spots to get married on the beach and to help you along, we're going to help you figure out how to make the perfect Long Island wedding invitations for your guests with a little guide.



Getting An Accurate Count Of The Guest

From the caterer and the cake to the selection of the reception hall, having an accurate count of how many guests are coming to the wedding is vital, you need to know how much money you're going to spend so you can weigh your options in regards to purchasing and spending for the various parts of your wedding.

There Are many Different Beach Styles To Consider

When that wedding is to take place on the beach there are a number of different considerations and some unique opportunities for the perfect beach wedding invitations. The popularity of Long Island weddings has been steadily on the rise, and this has led to a variety of wedding invitations that are perfect for beach themed weddings.

One of the most important things when choosing the perfect Long Island beach wedding invitations is to match those wedding invitations to the overall look and style of the wedding ceremony itself. For example: it is important to choose casual wedding invitations for laid back weddings and more formal ones for more elegant beach weddings.

Below are a list of some of the Long Island related themes and motifs for you to consider implementing into the design of your wedding invitations:

• Sea shells
• Sea horses
• Star fish
• Beach sand
• Jamaican drums
• Sun set
• Moon light on the beach

Shop For Your Beach Wedding Invitations In A Timely Fashion

It is also important to start shopping around as early as possible, no matter what types beach wedding invitations you are considering. Since beach weddings are exceptionally popular, and the summer season is always the busiest for weddings, and the people who design, create and print wedding invitations are likely to be very busy during this time of year. By shopping around as early as possible you will not only have the best selection but you will be assured that your wedding guests will have plenty of time to respond to your invitations and join you on your big day.

Short Guide to Decent Wedding Invitations

Stumbled across this not too long ago:

"The wedding date and time has been set, the location for the special event has been finalized, and the decision for the wedding theme – traditional and formal or fun and casual – has been made. Now it’s time to take the next step and create wedding invitations that reflect the celebration you’ve planned and provide the information needed for friends and family to have a pleasant experience as wedding guests.

Wedding invitations are the first place your guests will actually get a sense of the wedding you’ve planned. Whether your budget allows for custom made invitations ranging from sophisticated to artistic or do-it-yourself creations, there are plenty of options to provide memorable wedding invitations.

An exquisite array of invitations is available for those planning a formal or traditional wedding. Before you begin visually scanning all the possibilities, familiarize yourself with the language of printers and invitation designers. Understanding the various folds, tri-fold, z-fold, and French-fold, as well as terms such as embossing, thermography, deckle edge and die-cutting can save you time and money.

For the adventurous, a variety of unique wedding invitations can be explored from the homespun feel of a custom portrait boxed with rose petals to CD/DVD presentations for the tech-savvy couple.

Once you’ve selected the design for your wedding invitations, you’ll want to find creative wording to convey the sentiment of your relationship and wedding. Examining wedding invitation etiquette is a good place to begin for the appropriate wording of your invitations.

Regardless of whether your wedding invitations are traditional or casual, you will want to include an RSVP/response card, and a reception card. Other options are also available to include in the mailing as a way to give your guests all the information needed to join in your special celebration." - Kevin Stith

What Do People Even Do With Wedding Invitations?

We’ve all seen it as we’re growing up. The steady increase in the amount of wedding invitations you receive in the mail. There will come a point in your life when you start receiving one a week from old high school buddies, fellow college graduates, and even people in your work place. You will start wishing that you never made any of these friends or that you shouldn't of dumped your last boyfriend who would have made the ideal husband. But looking back and reflecting isn't going to change anything really; it especially won’t change that all of these damnable wedding invitations look the same. Not only are they an eyesore, but they clog up space in your room, on your tables, and in your mailbox. Perhaps you get invited to tons of weddings and don't even want to go, but that doesn't mean you should have to suffer going through twenty invitations that all look the same, right? Couples getting married should be lavishing you with custom wedding invitations with your name on them; at least this way you would be more likely to keep them, right?

Well now you have to figure out something to do with all of these wedding invitations, in my case all of them were addressed to me from Long Island. You can throw them out, but then you’ll be accused of wasting paper and disrespecting your friends wedding. The human conscience is such a cumbersome thing at times. But fret not! There are many creative, useful, and fun things you can do with all of these wedding invitations. If you have enough, you can easily create a giant wall hanging by buying a large piece of mounting board and ‘scrap booking’ all of the invitations into a creative collage. Schlep it inside of a glass frame or case and viola. Art. This is doubly impressive when your friends, family, and loved ones come over and see the wall hanging and spend time attempting to find where their wedding invitation is.

Long Island Wedding Invitations Rated the Most Creative Across America

As the Baby Boomers settle down and finally get married we’ve noticed a sharp increase in the amount of weddings and purchases made for weddings; an increase greater than any previous year in American history. These purchases are everything from dowry gifts, liquor, clothing, photographs, cakes, foods, music, and the all-too-important: wedding invitations. Suffice to say that many women will tell you that wedding invitations are the most important part of the wedding since it’s the first thing a person sees or receives in regards to your special day. These wedding invitations quickly become coveted items among soon-to-be wed couples and many companies find themselves scrambling to offer the best wedding invitation services around. It’s not just about getting your paper packages together to send off to your loved ones, its about getting it done right. The companies that do best in this field are the ones that match your wedding invitations to your color themes and motifs; the majority of these companies come from Long Island.



Long island is known for its taffy, upscale housing, and its stationery companies. Places such as Cyperus Greetings; wedding service companies dating back to the late 1970’s have had the time and experience to keep up with design, wedding, and fashion trends to ensure that their wedding invitations main at the top of the crowd. Other companies have done innovative things such as expanding wedding invitations into the digital realm. These new media invitations focus on short webcasts, podcasts, or any other digital form to get personalized wedding invitations out to the people who need them with less money and more creativity.

The Best Wedding Invitations of Long Island

It’s not the quantity, nor is it the quality; it’s the amount of quality that you get with a large quality that matters when you’re talking about wedding invitations. Planning your wedding invitations is much of the same breed as attempting to find the perfect mathematical or scientific equation for balance. In this cause it’s: (quality + quantity = success). You want to be able to make sure that all of your friends and loved ones receive invitations that express how important they are; at the same time you want to make sure you can afford all of the invitations that you want to send people. I’m going to use Long Island as a location and example of the best wedding invitations that are both affordable and beautiful. Below are things that these wedding invitations take into consideration:



1) How many colors do you actually need in your invitation?

This is important because the more colors that you have on your invitation, the more expensive it is. Most print shops and print services charge considerably more for four color process printing rather than two color printing. If you can limit your wedding palette to two specific colors that you and your spouse agree on (aside from black and white) you’re well on your way to saving money. Using less colors makes it easier for your wedding invitations to carry a symbolic message rather than have a myriad of colors that don’t make much sense when put together on an invitation.


2) Do you want to use photography in your invitation?

Photography is a double edged sword with wedding invitations. Sometimes the use of photographs as a collage for wedding invitations give a cheesy and very impersonal attitude. However; when done correctly, a single photograph of either an iconic scene in regards to the couple getting married, or perhaps even a picture of the couple itself taken by a professional photographer, can serve as an excellent wedding invitation.


3) Where are you getting you invitations printed from?

This also has to do with the printing process once more; the type of paper that you decide to get your invitations printed on will affect the price. Most private print shops I found in long island would make an attempt to get you to buy over priced paper. To avoid this situation, you should find a student graphic designer or print designer from an accredited design school and ask them to make and format your invitations. This way you can take them to a staples or a kinkos and have them printed on the same quality paper at a considerably lower price.


4) Are you buying a stock set of wedding invitations from a company?

Also a double edged sword, buying stock wedding invitations can save you the trouble of sizing and printing your own invitations, but you lose the ability to customize them to make them personable; however I found that some services of wedding invitations in long island offered a large variety of creative invitations so that finding something personal was easy enough.


Though this article is based largely on my experience of wedding invitations in Long Island, it applies to wedding invitations everywhere and if you’re going to get married you should take all of the points in this article into account. Good luck and lead long happy marriages!.

Getting Invitations Ready for your Wedding in Long Island

Long Island Wedding Invitations: Get ready to send them out now.

With the summer already upon us (and dwindling for a few of us), we find ourselves in all sorts of predicaments. These situations range from silly things such as making sure to visit a water park before the fall comes, all the way to getting your wedding in order at the last minute. Personally, I’m not getting married, however my older sister is slated to get married by the end of august and she’s freaking out. Oddly enough, she came to me to help her pick a location for her wedding, and with little knowledge of anywhere beyond the east coast, my answer was simple, straightforward, and accepted with little argument. I suggested Long Island.

Now you might be wondering just why I suggested Long Island of all places instead of one of the other many beaches along the east coast; I.E: more notable places such as Miami, Daytona Beach, Myrtle Beach, etc. And when questioned by my sister I responded by explaining that unlike the other locations, Long Island is by far less touristy because its hard enough to drive to, and most people staying there are ritzy New Yorkers and people from New Jersey who keep to their oversized beach houses and leave you alone. The beaches are well kept, and there are more than enough wedding companies and services in Long Island that you won’t have to worry about getting your wedding over with (not that you want it to just be ‘over with’). Of course, once you pick the spot, and the wedding service, it’s time to send out your Long Island wedding invitations; choosing a company should be easy enough and once you get your invitations out, you’ll be well on your way to a breeze through wedding. That is saying of course there are no crazy ex’s in your life that vowed to ruin it.

Why Birthday Invitations are Becoming Obsolete.

Found this article written about Birthday Invitations, of course it can also be applied to wedding invitations as a creative way to bring people to your special party:


"The title says it all; how many people above the age of thirteen actually use birthday invitations? Not many. With the advent of email, less and less people are actually using real mail (snail mail) to invite their friends and loved ones to their birthday parties, shindigs, bashes, and get-togethers. So what does that mean? People are still throwing huge parties which means that everyone is still getting their invitations somehow. Sadly, it was social networking and web 2.0 that gave the finishing blow to paper, personalized, birthday invitations. Things like Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, all have built in applications to allow a user to invite large volumes of friends to an ‘event’. There’s no need for personalization, a simple webpage is made and a link is sent to a number of recipients. Simple, cold, and completely impersonal, but effective. And the age is continuously shrinking for those that subscribe to the traditional way of inviting people to their birthday parties.

So what is a person to do? How does one of traditional tastes survive in this expanding digital world? A simple fusion of both tradition and personalization with technology. But how?! Here’s an example that I’ve tried, tested, and found to work to a great degree. If you have access to a video camera, or a web camera, all you need to do is set yourself up in a relatively quiet room (for audio recording purposes) and then give a short testimonial for why you want a specific person to come to your birthday party. This will take time, a little bit of technological know-how, but it will be worth it. You can then ship off each movie either on a CD/DVD to your respective friends, or you can email each one separately. This will not only make your friends realize how much you care about them, but you can keep up with the technological curve."

Cyperus Personalized Wedding Invitations: Creative ways to invite the people you care about.

It’s crunch time, your wedding is coming up within the next three months, your husband is slacking off and you still haven’t sent out your wedding invitations to friends, family, and loved ones. Suffice to say, what you need to do is somehow come up with creative, affordable, and memorable invitations to send off to the invitees before you’re forced to buy a stack of hallmark cards and end up as the laughing stock among your group of friends. By the end of this article, you’ll have found at least three different ways to construct invitations that you can send off to your friends and loved ones feeling reassured that they will enjoy the heartfelt sentiments behind something made by hand that will give the recipients the feeling that you made the invitations from the infamous Cyperus Plant.

I’m going to run you through one quick project that will give you tons of ideas for future wedding invitations, or even invitations to your future baby shower. You’re going to need a 3 foot by 4 foot piece of heavy, white, matte paper which you can buy from any store you like. For the next step you’ll need a few cans of spray mount, which is essentially spray-able glue which you’ll then spray the entire white space of the matte paper. The next step is to get a large amount of leaves, make sure they are completely free of dirt and then lay them out on top of the matte paper until you can’t see anymore white space. Go out and buy glossy, clear finish paint and go over the entire white board to give the leaves a shine. You should now have a beautiful, natural mosaic. Grab your knife, scissors, or cutting device of choice and slice up the mosaic into rectangles the size you want to mail off. Viola! Just write down a personal message to your guests and you’ll have personalized wedding invitations with minimal costs and half a day’s worth of effort.

Top Five Wedding Blogs of the week #1

Hello everyone, I'm reporting in for my daily update. I've got a list of five of the Must-Go-To wedding blogs of the week for those of you who are thinking about getting married, going to get married, or are just finished with your wedding and you're wondering how you could have done a better job.

#1 Style Me Pretty
"Style Me Pretty is really all about wedding inspiration. It’s about helping brides to design their own unique and personal wedding style. Whether they are inspired by a particular color palette, a beautiful reception venue or even by something as simple as piece of jewelry…Style Me Pretty is about translation your inspirations into a cohesive look and style for your own wedding."

#2 Offbeat Bride
"Ariel, author of the book Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides. This blog is just the tip of the offbeat iceberg — for the whole story you'll need the book, which is half memoir, half tipster handbook. I also blog at Electrolicious. "

#3 Wedding Bee
"Weddingbee is a wedding blog updated daily by 20 real brides across the US and Canada. We feature wedding inspiration and ideas, diy projects, product reviews, vendor spotlights, advice and news, with a core focus on real brides’ wedding planning journeys from engagement to “I Do” and beyond. The site is updated up to 20 times a day and is read obsessively by brides, grooms, bridesmaids, women, wedding vendors and industry insiders alike."

#4 Wedding Fanatic
"WeddingFanatic is the ultimate resource for brides to keep up on the hottest wedding trends!"

#5 Wedding Mapper
"Founded in January 2007, Wedding Mapper has become the premier online destination for couples to create an interactive and fully customizable wedding map. The Wedding Mapper map allows couples to share a large amount of detailed information such as ceremony and reception details, lodging, travel logistics, popular tourist sites, and places that are important to the engaged couple through markers on the map. Personalized descriptions and photos can be attached to each wedding map marker. Guests can use the map to plan their travel itinerary, get driving directions, and familiarize themselves with the wedding location. Whether a bride and groom are creating a hometown or destination wedding, Wedding Mapper makes planning the wedding, sharing information with guests and trip planning easier than ever."