You have begun planning the most important day of your life and one of the first items on your to-do list is picking out wedding invitations. This is probably the first time you will begin feeling overwhelmed with the enormous selection and start to wonder, "how do I choose wedding invitations that will make my wedding special and unique"?

Your wedding invitations will be the first impression you make upon family and friends. They will also serve as the initial impression and tempo for the wedding. One of the first things to decide upon is a style of wedding invitation. You want to match your invitations with the theme you intend to have for your wedding. Whether its modern, traditional in a church, on a beach, at an exotic resort or in a casual garden, you'll want to portray the initial setting through your invitation.
Secondly, you can customize and make a generic invitation unique through your own photos and wording. The easiest way to customize a wedding invitation is to use wording that pertains only to you. Think of your personality and your spouse’s personality. What are your hobbies and likes? You can incorporate your character and creativity into your wedding invitations, your actual wedding, and your wedding reception.

Consider the season that your wedding will take place in. A fall wedding can be accented with fall colors, leaves, pumpkins or possibly Halloween themes.  Respectively, a winter wedding can be portrayed with snowflakes, Christmas lights, hymns, and even a horse and carriage ride. Creating a wedding that incorporates all of these things as a reflection of the season will make for a memorable event and most of all, its easy to do.

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Nowadays couples tend to search for really unique wedding invitations. There are also a number of wedding invitation designers who provide this service. Yet a couple may want to have their own idea and concept for designing the wedding invitation. A question follows this notion will be “Is there any formula to generate these ideas?” The answer is yes and no. There is no such formula in the view of design. However, there are some methodologies that we can follow to make a beautiful and unique wedding invitation. These methodologies are namely “Make it Grand”, “Ready made Concepts” and “Do it abstract”.

Make it Grand

This is the most common way to design a wedding invitation. Every detail has to be very nice looking. And it mainly connects with the elements and printing processes adopted in the wedding invitation card. Some common elements that will be used are vine patterns in Victorian style, Monograms or even the word double happiness in the context of Chinese wedding invitation. These elements are used to create a sense of nobleness. To facilitate this sense of nobleness, process such as hot stamping, embossing, engraving and die-cutting will be adopted.

The material used will be paper with sparkling effect. The key of making this wedding invitation look nice will be the way of composing the patterns and the combination of different printing process described. Indeed this kind of design is material and process oriented. One may even feel that the more processes / material is involved, the better the design. Of course the cost of the card will be higher in this case.

To make a wedding invitation under the concept of “Make it Grand”, a couple has to research on different monograms and patterns to fit their needs. There are plenty of books about this patterns and one good thing is that most patterns in these books are royalty free. Couples can apply these patterns directly to their wedding invitation card design. If they have knowledge in image processing software, they can even make the design themselves and have a print shop to print them out.

Ready made Concepts

The notion of Ready made Concepts does not necessarily mean it is not unique. The true meaning of “Ready made Concepts” here is “picking some ideas / items we see everyday and transform them to wedding invitations”.

In Hong Kong, there has been wedding invitation design trying to imitate a passport. This is an interesting and creative concept indeed. The couple can put their photos in this “passport”. They can even put their story, such as how they met, when they became boy and girl friends in this passport. The wedding invitation is not only an invitation, but also a story book which tells the story of the couple.

Another idea is an air ticket, an air ticket may not be as romantic as the passport since there may not be enough space for telling the stories. However, it is very interesting in sense that a guest gets a “ticket”, and with this ticket he/she can attend the wedding ceremony.

At this point, it will not be surprising to think of a wedding invitation in the form of a sculpture, or to be more exact, a 3-dimensional piece of wedding invitation. Some wedding invitation providers provide glass bottles as wedding invitations. The only concern for this kind of wedding invitation may cost a couple a lot when they try to mail them out.

There are tremendous amount of “Ready made Concepts”. Couples can just observe and make their own unique wedding invitation.

Do it Abstract

This is the most difficult concept for wedding invitation design. The concept of the wedding invitation is more abstract but there will be much more meaning in this kind of wedding invitation.

A couple, say, Angela and Peter, can make two wedding invitations, one with the initial A and one with P on the covers. Angela’s friend will receive invitations with a P and Peter’s friend will receive that with an A. In the wedding banquet, the couple will be pulled together. Every item will be printing with both A and P. This design is based on the following concept. Conceptually Angela and Peter are two different units before marriage, and this is the reason for two wedding invitations. However, starting from the day of marriage, they become one unit and everything is united together as “ONE”. All the items such as table cards, Order of Services and Thank You Cards will be printed with both A and P.

This kind of wedding invitation may be the most interesting among the three. However, it requires more thought in order to generate the design concept.

About the Author:

Jerry Leung is a wedding invitation designer based in Hong Kong. Leung has a great interest in Chinese Style Wedding Invitations. His works can be found from http://www.983wedding.com/, some other vendors of wedding services can be found from http://www.imarry.org/ and http://uk.imarry.org/.

Nowadays there are different styles of wedding invitations. Indeed wedding invitation is one of the “must items” for a wedding. It is used to announce the wedding and spread the joy and happiness of the couple. A well designed wedding invitation can give an unexpected impression to the guests. It is in fact marking the beginning of a wedding ceremony.

Depending on different cultures, different elements can be seen on a wedding invitation. For example, traditionally in China, wedding invitations are usually red in color, with the famous Chinese character “double happiness” printed on it while a traditional wedding invitation in Europe or USA is usually white in color. Of course an Indian wedding invitation will have Lord Ganesh printed, which means a blessing from God, it may not be applicable to most of us though.

In this article, it is attempted to explain different elements forming a Chinese wedding invitation, which can inspire couples who are planning their Big Day.

Common elements on Chinese wedding invitation

As discussed, one of the major elements of a Chinese wedding invitation is the red color. “Double Happiness” is also very common on such invitations. Apart from these famous elements, sometimes a pair of dragon and phoenix can be found on a Chinese wedding invitation. Another element, which may be surprising to some of the readers, is a pair of chickens.

Red Color

As most of us may know, a Chinese wedding invitation is usually red in color. However, not many people know the reason why it is in such color. In fact, red color is not only for wedding, it is also the main theme of Chinese festivals such as Chinese New Year.

Concerning wedding invitations, Chinese wedding invitations are of different colors a few thousand years ago. Chinese used black color wedding invitations a few thousand years ago. It is believed that there were five emperors, Red, Blue, Yellow, White and Black Emperors in Chinese History. They are indeed the ancestors of Chinese people. The black color of the wedding invitation may probably be coming from the notion of the five emperors.

The red color came to Chinese wedding invitation, and other festivals in the Han Dynasty. The first emperor of the Han Dynasty declared himself as the son of Red Emperor. Starting from this legend, the red color became the main theme of different celebrations and festivals. This theme also became the main color of wedding invitations.

One may doubt that why gold and yellow were not adopted as main color of wedding invitations, as it can be always seen in traditional Chinese palaces. In fact gold and yellow are also meant to be something lucky and joyful. It is also interpreted as a symbol of the royal family, or the emperor. The only one who could use these colors is the emperor. This forms the reason why gold and yellow colors are not the primary colors of a wedding invitation. However, culture is changing from time to time. More people start adopting gold and yellow color the Chinese wedding invitation designs.

Double Happiness

In Chinese culture, wedding is always related to the notion of double happiness. This “double happiness” is an interesting Chinese character. It looks like two people standing side by side. In fact we can interpret it as a couple standing together. From here we may get a clue of the reason for printing the character “double happiness” on the wedding invitation.

This character bears the meaning of getting together. It declares that a man and a woman, and two families will be united as one. The character “double happiness” is usually printed on the red invitations with golden hot stamping.

Dragon and Phoenix

Dragon has long been the symbol of China and Chinese people. When Dragon and Phoenix come as a pair, dragon represents male and phoenix represents female. Dragon and Phoenix can be interpreted as a perfect couple. Similar to “double happiness”, this pair are one of the elements which is usually seen in wedding invitation design, with golden hot stamping.

A pair of chickens

In Chinese, chicken is pronounced as “Ji”, the pronunciation is similar to another Chinese character meaning good luck. A pair of chicken becomes a blessing to the couple. It blesses them good luck for the rest of the life after marriage. This pair of chickens are usually full color printed on the invitation. It looks a traditional paper cutting. This delivers a quality of Chinese style which a hot stamping logo cannot be replaced with.

About the Author:
Jerry Leung is a wedding invitation designer based in Hong Kong. Leung has a great interest in Chinese Style Wedding Invitations. His works can be found from http://www.983wedding.com/, some other vendors of wedding services can be found from http://www.imarry.org/ and http://us.imarry.org/dir/.

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