Between “Will you marry me?” and “I do,” there is a lot that has to happen! If you’ve been through the process before, perhaps with a friend or family member, you have some idea of just how many tasks there are to complete, and most of them need to go in a specific order or things get rather chaotic.
As you embark on your own wedding planning journey, here are a few steps that are best accomplished before you even start creating your wedding invitation card design. When you sit down with one of our design experts, it’s extremely helpful to have these details already worked out so that you know just what your invitations need to say.
Budget Considerations
As in so many other areas of life, we have to talk about money! Putting on a wedding takes a lot of it, and the exact nature of the ceremony, its location, the reception, and the invitations are all dependent on what the budget looks like. It’s a big mistake to go into the wedding planning process without a definite idea of what your total budget is and what you plan to spend on individual elements of it.
That doesn’t mean that you have to have a specific dollar amount designated for every little detail and that you can’t adjust that as you go along, but starting without a budget at all is a recipe for spending many thousands of dollars more than you expected to.
Guest List Size
Once you know how much you can spend, you can start thinking about how many people you can invite. This step and the next step–selecting the location–might need to take place simultaneously, since venues obviously have limits on how many people you can host. Either way, it’s very important to know how many people you would like to invite, as long as your venue can accommodate them.
The size of your guest list has an impact not just on the ceremony venue, but also on the reception–will you feed everyone a full meal or just dessert? It also affects the cost of your wedding invitation card design and printing, as well as postage for your save the dates and the invitations themselves.
Wedding Venue
What’s the perfect location for your wedding? It may be close to home, it may be somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit, or it may be a place that already holds special memories for you as a couple. With our design studio based near Charleston, South Carolina, we talk to couples all the time who are choosing to get married at one of the historic churches, beautiful estates, or oceanside outdoor venues here in our area.
Clearly, having your venue selected and reserved is a must before you start designing your wedding invitations. Not only is it–along with the date–the most important piece of information in the invitation, but the venue can also inspire many of the artistic features of the invitation suite. For instance, a watercolor wedding map is a whimsical, original, and beautiful way to give your guests a taste of what the venue and its surrounding area is like.
Wedding Planner
The single biggest key to avoiding feeling overwhelmed as you plan your wedding? Getting the help of someone who plans weddings for a living. Selecting a wedding planner as early as possible will make all the subsequent tasks much easier.
For instance, as you look for the perfect venue in the city or region that you are interested in, your wedding planner will provide valuable insights about cost, capacity, lodging nearby, and other details that would take you much longer to find out on your own. They can also help you think through your options, based on your budget, and narrow down your choices so that you don’t have quite as many possibilities to consider.
Once you’ve made headway in these areas, it’s finally time to think about wedding invitations! We certainly hope that you choose to make Dodeline Design your partner in creating, printing, and distributing your save the dates and invitations ahead of the big day. Check out examples of our past work and get in touch with us to set up an appointment through our website. We hope to meet you soon!
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