It took Drew and I nearly an entire year to decide on our wedding stationary. (We will have been engaged a year this Thursday!) We seriously designed tons and tons of options and liked them all, but couldn’t pin down a single one to actually use for our save-the-dates and thank you cards. We knew that we had to get them in the mail soon so that out-of-town guests could start thinking about their travel plans and everyone could go ahead and get our date written down on their calendars. So this is what we ended up with:

Super simple really. We had more intricate and detailed designs made that used our engagement pictures, but when it came down to it, we really liked the simplicity of this design. We liked the subtle background texture (it is the same as the background of my blog) paired with the simple font, typographically lined up.

We designed them ourselves and had them printed through a company that we have a trade account with and use to print all of our P.S. Designs print products. They actually ended up being free, because we had a credit on our account from a previous business order that had been misprinted.

If you are interested in designing something yourself and having them printed like we did, but don’t have a business trade account, you can try a company like GotPrint. An estimate from them for what we had printed for our save-the-dates (250 4×6 postcards, 16 pt dull cover with matte finish, color both sides) is about $30 plus shipping. That does mean though that you have to have some kind of design software to make your card design in the right format with the correct bleeds and everything.  If you are looking for something similar and can’t do it yourself, send me an e-mail through my contact page, I do graphic design and offer printing services.

We printed ours out as 4×6 postcards. On the back of our save-the-dates we simply had our return address printed in the upper left corner and then left the rest of the card blank so that we could add labels with the guest’s addresses on them. On the thank-you cards, we  just printed a little line to separate where we could write a personal thank-you message and then write the guest’s address down on the other side.

If you are planning your wedding, you might consider going the postcard route as well. Both save-the-dates and thank-you cards are supposed to be sweet, personal, and informal, and I think that postcards really convey that well. In addition, we saved money by not having to buy envelopes for them and also saved 20 cents a card on postage since we could use 29 cent postcard stamps instead of 49 cent regular letter stamps. When you are talking about mailing so many of them, those few cents really add up!

So happy to have them all addressed and mailed now! The challenge now is going to be trying to decide on a design for the actual invitations… Maybe we need another year? 🙂