How to design all your own wedding stationery with Canva

There’s so much to organize and think about when preparing for your wedding, decision fatigue can set in quickly and make even the most straightforward choices difficult. Before you start wondering whether you really should’ve gone with that wedding planner, Canva’s here to make designing your own wedding stationery easy. Yes, easy.

Canva’s intuitive design tools make it easy to research and decide on your design aesthetic, create a wide range of cohesive wedding stationery and perhaps the best part of all – you can even print directly from the Canva editor. Let’s jump in and see how easy wedding invitation design can truly be with Canva.

Designing your own wedding stationery can save you some serious money, but what if there was a way to do it so easily, it also saves you time? Making your own wedding invitations⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and save-the-date cards⁠(opens in a new tab or window) in Canva is intuitive and easy. So easy, in fact, that once you’ve created one item of stationery, it’s just a matter of a few clicks to create a whole suite of cohesive and unique stationery to perfectly reflect your wedding vibe.

Before we get into how to create your own wedding stationery in Canva, let’s start with the easiest, most enjoyable and most distracting step in creating your stationery aesthetic – research. You want your wedding to be a true expression of your relationship and making time to research will help fast-track you to understanding what you like and, just as importantly, what you don’t like. In its simplest form, design is just arranging imagery and text, and while we know it’s not that easy, it’s a helpful way to simplify your task. Start by creating an inspiration folder and within it, subfolders with imagery and text.

Then, start researching, scrolling, collecting, and saving imagery and text that resonates with you. In this way, you’ll start working towards building your aesthetic. You’ll start noticing certain fonts feel right while others are not quite right and even way off. You’ll come to understand whether photographs, illustrations or a more minimalist aesthetic feels right. The research will guide you to inspiration, just be sure to keep an eye on your deadline and try to see when research starts becoming procrastination.

So you’ve done just the right amount of research. You’ve worked through the early stages where you feel overwhelmed by all the design work and decisions you need to make. You’ve avoided using research as procrastination and have a better idea of what your dream wedding stationery looks like. Instead of worrying about every piece of collateral you want to create, start by defining your aesthetic with your wedding invitation. Why? Because first impressions matter, and it’s the most complex wedding stationery to design.

One of Canva’s best creative tools is templates. Created by professional designers, templates help you start inspired and make design easy whatever your level of experience.

In Canva, start by searching ‘Wedding Invitation.’ There are over 20,000 wedding invitation templates to help you fast-track your wedding stationery design. Remember that templates are a starting point for your design journey. You can customize, edit and move every design element and font to make it truly unique. Choose a design that resonates with you, and then you can start customizing it. Check out this video tutorial on how to make your own stationery for some more tips.

You can customize Canva’s designer-made templates in 6 easy steps:

1. Choose from our library of professionally created templates.
2. Change the images. Upload your own images or choose from our stock library of over 1 million photographs, graphics and illustrations.
3. Change the fonts. Choose from over 130 fresh fonts.
4. Change the background. Choose a background from our library or use an image.
5. Change the colors. Change the colorof your text boxes and text to add extra flair.
6. Save and share.
   

Choosing a color palette will help create a cohesive look and feel for your wedding invitation. If you want some help choosing complementary colors, check out this handy guide to color theory. Start with choosing a font. If you want some more guidance on the different types of fonts and their design implications, check out our course on Typography and Layout. Changing the font will make a huge difference to the look of your invitation and can help set the aesthetic as you change the imagery and move or remove other design elements. As you move on to different design elements, keep referring back to your research to help you make decisions. Check out this dedicated guide on how to create your own wedding invitation for more ideas and tips.

If you outsource your wedding stationery, they tend to charge you for every different piece of stationery you want. With Canva, it’s free, quick and easy. There are two ways you can make light work of spreading your aesthetic across different stationery. The first is Brand Kit, which is a Canva Pro feature, and well worth the investment. The second is the Magic Switch tool.

Brand Kit is a Canva Pro feature (you can start your free trial and check out pricing here) which lets you set up your design elements – color palette, typography, even a logo (which could just be your names or initials). Once you’ve set it up, go into your wedding invitation design and the left side panel. When you go into the Logos, Styles and Text tabs, you’ll see the colors and typography from your Brand Kit available to use. To update your invitation to align with your chosen aesthetic, simply click the color palette (keep clicking it to try different color combinations), and font and watch as your invitation comes to life.

Magic Switch is an amazing tool that will save you so much time, and money, by effortlessly resizing your design to fit different stationery sizes. Same as with Brand Kit, it is a Pro feature, so you’ll need to sign up for a Pro account to use it. Once you’ve designed your wedding invitation and you’re ready to move on to creating a menu in two clicks. On the left of the top menu, next to ‘File’, you’ll see Resize. Click and see a list of different collateral you can magically resize your design to fit.

If you can’t find the stationery you’re after, simply set your custom dimensions up the top. And yes, applying your aesthetic across different wedding stationery is really that simple. Before we get into how to print directly from the Canva editor, let’s take a look at how you can even apply your aesthetic to videos or save the date videos.

Canva lets you create consistent and cohesive wedding stationery and you can even apply your aesthetic to video. Incorporating a video into your wedding can be a beautiful way to share your story, include your guests and add an unexpected dimension to your event. Whether it’s a simple slideshow showing cherished moments with friends, family and each other, or something with a bit more storytelling, making videos in Canva is easy.

If you’ve never made videos in Canva before, check out our series on getting started with video here⁠(opens in a new tab or window). You can use Brand Kit to apply your aesthetic to your video in a few easy clicks. Or you can customize the color palette and typography yourself for a beautiful DIY wedding video.

Once you’ve finished designing your wedding stationery, you can print it directly from Canva. You can select your paper stock, set your quantity and you’ll even be guided through how to proof your design so it prints perfectly.

In the top right, click ‘Share’, then ‘Print Your Design’. Choose the best printing option, for example ‘Invitation (landscape)’. Then simply follow the prompts, which includes proofing your design to ensure the best possible final product, to finish off the final step in your wedding stationery project!

There you have it – one less thing to worry about for your wedding! No need to call a last minute wedding planner to take care of your wedding stationery. Canva makes it easy, even if you’re new to the world of design. Remember the only limitation to what you can create is your imagination and Canva templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window) help spark ideas so you can create beautiful designs easier and faster. If you're in need of more options, you can also explore the wide range of wedding slideshow templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window) from SlidesCarnival to add a touch of elegance to your special day.