You are not choosing a picture. You are choosing what your guests do with their thumb. Your invitation travels as a link in a chat thread, so the screen it lands on is usually a phone, held one-handed, with something else going on nearby. Judge a design on how it behaves there: how your names sit on it, how much writing it expects from you, whether it suits the formality of your day, and how it holds up when the signal is poor.
Open it full screen before you decide anything
Every design in the gallery can be opened in full before you make an account. Each card has a Preview button, and it opens the whole invitation - scrolling, animation, sound, reply section and all - with sample names and dates standing in for yours. Arrows at the top step you straight to the next design, so you can compare four or five without going back to the grid each time.
Do that on a phone, not on your laptop. The desktop view flatters everything: the type is larger, the images arrive instantly, and the whole design sits in one comfortable window. None of that describes the situation your guests are in. Send yourself the link and open it the way they will.
- Turn wifi off first. A design that only behaves on home broadband has not really been tested - most of your guests will open it on two or three bars of mobile data.
- Leave the sound on for one pass. Some of your guests will have theirs on, and you should know what they hear.
- Scroll all the way to the bottom, including the reply section. First screens are built to impress. The rest is the part people actually use.
- Hand the phone to someone who has not seen it, say nothing, and watch where their thumb stops.
How your names will sit on the page
Display type is where a design most often breaks, and it breaks quietly. The cover you are looking at was set with sample names, and yours are a different length. Two short first names sit comfortably at a large size on one line. A long surname, a hyphenated name, or a name carrying a family segment will either shrink to fit or wrap onto a second line, and the cover stops being the one you fell for.
Look at that cover and picture your own names in the space, at that size. Do the same for the venue name and for the longest line on the schedule, which is usually a place rather than a time. If the names sit over a photograph, look at them in daylight as well as at night. Pale type on a bright image reads beautifully on a laptop in a dark room and vanishes at a bus stop.
How much writing the design is asking you for
Designs differ in appetite. Some want a story section, a photo gallery, a schedule covering several events, directions and a note to guests. Others are one screen: the essentials and a reply button. Neither is better than the other. The question is which one you can genuinely fill.
An empty section does not read as restraint. It reads as unfinished. Before you commit, count what you honestly have. Photographs of the two of you that you actually like. One event, or three. A story you want to tell in public rather than at a table. Family names you are willing to list, and the arguments that come with listing some and not others. The test to apply is simple: if you cannot fill a section with something you would say out loud to a guest, leave it out, and choose a design that does not have it.
Match the formality of the day, not the mood board
The design does the job the paper stock used to do. Before a guest reads a word, it tells them roughly what to wear and how the day is going to feel. Movement and strong colour set the expectation of an evening party. A quiet design sets the expectation of a ceremony with elders present. If your day is both, take the calmer design and let the wording carry the difference, because a page dressed for the reception makes the morning ceremony look like an afterthought.
Two more things belong here. Your invitation is read by your parents’ friends as well as by yours, and where two families expect different things, the restrained choice usually survives contact with both. And do not choose a design purely because it matches your colour scheme. Palettes move while you plan - the florist substitutes, the fabric arrives a shade off, someone changes their mind in March - and the design chosen only for the match becomes the thing that looks wrong.
What the design costs a guest to open
Everything on the page is something a phone has to fetch. A design built from large photographs and layered animation asks more of a slow connection than a plain one, and the guest you are most anxious about is often the one with the worst signal. We do not publish load figures for any of the designs, and we would rather you ran the test on your own phone than took a number from us.
So run it. Open the design over mobile data, on the oldest phone in the family. If the first screen appears quickly, and the names, the date and the place arrive before anything decorative does, the design is fine. If you find yourself watching an empty area while artwork loads, either pick something simpler or keep the design and be sparing with what you add to it. A guest who gives up before the page finishes never tells you they gave up.
If none of them fit
There are three honest answers, and only one of them is a different design.
The first is that the closest design is usually close enough. Wording carries more of your wedding than artwork does. The names, the dates, the way you address each guest and the note you write for them are all yours whichever design sits behind them, and they are the parts your family will quote back to you.
The second is a custom design, which is a different route entirely: designers involved, a conversation, and a longer wait than picking something ready-made. It sits on the Excellence plan rather than Essential, so it is worth asking about before you start building rather than after. The pricing page sets out what each plan includes in your country.
The third is that a digital invitation is not the thing you want at all. If what is in your head is an object - something with weight, in an envelope, that an aunt keeps in a drawer for thirty years - no design on a screen replaces it, and we would rather say so than talk you round. Our cost guide works through what printing comes to once the envelopes, the addressing, the postage and the reprints are counted.
Frequently asked questions
Can I see a design properly before I pay?
Yes. Every design in the gallery opens as a full preview, exactly as a guest would see it, with sample names in place of yours, and you do not need an account for that. Once you have signed up you can put your own names and dates in and look at the whole thing again, still before paying.
Will a long name fit on the design I like?
It will fit, but it may not sit the way the sample does. A cover set for two short names will either reduce a long one or wrap it onto a second line. Look at the preview and picture your own names in that space before you decide. Where two designs are otherwise equal, this is often what separates them.
Can the invitation be in another language?
The words on your invitation are not limited to English, and you can mix scripts on one invitation. The builder itself is in English. Cover lettering is the part worth checking, since ornamental faces are drawn for the Latin alphabet first: send us a line of your own wording in the script you want and we will look at how your chosen design copes with it.
Related: Browse the designs