How to Design Your Own Wedding Invitations with Canva

If you have yet to discover the amazingness that is Canva, allow us to make an introduction to this platform. Canva is a savvy bride’s BFF that makes creating your own wedding invitations a piece of cake! Did we mention it’s free?

About Canva

Canva is a drag-and-drop web-based design tool that you can use to create limitless documents, layouts, and designs right within your computer’s browser. You don’t need to be professional graphic designers to utilize this tool, it’s honestly super user-friendly and easy to use!

At The Budget Savvy Bride, we use Canva for tons of things. We use Canva to create the graphics for our ebooks, social media graphics to promote our blog and Podcast, Pinterest pins, as well as blog post graphics, and – of course– our free wedding invitation templates!

How to Use Canva to Create Your Own Wedding Invitations

In this post, we’re going to share everything you need to know about using Canva to make your own wedding invitations, programs, thank you cards and so much more. Learn more about how to make your own wedding invitations with Canva for free below!

The first thing you’ll need to do is sign up for a Canva account if you don’t already have one. A standard account is completely FREE, but the Pro version has some amazing add-ons and upgrades that make DIY invitation design a breeze. You can get a free trial of Canva Pro for 30 days — which is more than enough time to create your invite designs!

When you use our link, you’ll get access to a special deal of a 45-day free trial of Canva Pro!

Who knows, you may decide you love designing so much that you decide to start a side hustle! 😉 The yearly price is really reasonable for the wide variety of features that you get — and they are continuously adding upgrades and enhancements to their platform. It’s a no brianer!

One of the primary reasons to upgrade to Canva Pro is that it gives you access to the best fonts, graphics, images and more. Plus, you’ll be able to upload your own artwork, clipart, or even fonts if you’d like!

2: Start a New Design

We already have a wide variety of free Canva wedding invitations you can browse here on The Budget Savvy Bride, but if you want to make something completely custom, we’re going to show you how in this post!

We’re going to walk through the process of creating a wedding invitation with Canva. Start by creating a new design. Click the button in the top right corner of the browser. You can type in the word “invitation” and select whether you’d like a Portrait (tall) or Landscape (wide) orientation.

Savvy Tip for Wedding Invitation Sizing

Standard wedding invitations are 5×7 inches in size, which is best for mailing with a standard Postage stamp.

Once you’re inside the Canva Editor, take a few moments to click through the different tools in the left sidebar. There is so much to explore — from templates to photos, design elements and graphics, text styles, and more.

2.1 Using a Canva Template

When you open your new design document, you will see that there are a variety of templates you can choose from and customize yourself! If you find something you like, just click on the thumbnail and it will load the design to your page. If you are looking for a quick and easy solution and don’t want to dive down the custom invite design rabbit hole, use wedding invitation templates!

From there, you will be able to click on the text elements and edit the information to reflect the details of your wedding!

3. Creating Your Own Wedding Invitation Design

If you’d rather go rogue, we’ll walk you through the steps you’ll need to take to create your own design! Start out by creating a text block by clicking on the Text tab in the left sidebar.

3.1 Your Names

Start by putting in your and your fiance’s names. This is a great way to get started. You might find it easier to move the elements of your design around if you create separate text boxes for each name or line.

You can open the text style editor to browse available fonts. We typed in ‘script’ into the search and it displays all the various font options available to you. You’ll notice some of the fonts have a gold crown appear next to them– those are included in Canva Pro! As we mentioned, you can try Canva pro free for 30 days to get a feel for it– and we highly recommend it!

In this example, we separated the names + ‘and’ into individual text boxes, selected a script (Amsterdam Two in this example) and resized the text to 28 point font.

3.2 Introduction + Invitation Line

Create another text block and enter the introduction for your invitation. The text you choose to include will depend on several factors like who is paying for the wedding, how formal your wedding is, etc.

A safe, neutral choice for your introduction text is, “Together with their families,” but you can use whatever intro text you would like. You can then place the text intro above the names of the couple.

Below the names, you can finish your sentence, extending the invitation to your wedding guests to join your celebration! We put

Wedding Invitation Design Tip!

Size matters! The names are a focal point of your design, while the details are important and still need to be readable. We recommend making your introduction and supplementary text details no smaller than 10 point font for best readability.

3.3 Wedding Day Details

The wedding day details can be formatted any number of ways, so choose what looks best for you. Draw inspiration from their templates or from other invitation designs you’ve seen online. For the sake of this tutorial, we typed out the date and location for the wedding in plain sans serif text. (Font used: Garet.)

Tip: For dates, you should spell out the day of the week, the numbered date, as well as the year for a formal invitation. But feel free to get creative by using numerals and a fun layout if you’re feeling inspired!

Below the date, you’ll add the location of the wedding. Best practice is to not place the full address on the invitation itself, but the street name, city and state could be included. For this tutorial, we are inviting guests to the fictional wedding of Jim and Pam from The Office, so we just put Niagara Falls. 😉

Follow these details up by placing a ‘reception line’ indicating that there will be a party or reception following the ceremony. Additional details can be placed on other insert cards or on your wedding website!

3.4 Adding Design Elements

Next, if you’d like to personalize further, you can add clipart, photos, illustrations and more. Canva has a wide variety of elements to peruse within their platform, or alternately you can purchase artwork elsewhere online and import it into the Canva platform to utilize in your designs.

There are many free line art styles, many of which can be customized by resizing them and selecting a color. There is also artwork such as watercolor illustrations that cannot be colorized. Below you can see three different versions we made with different elements, by rearranging the text boxes and resizing. The possibilities are truly limitless!

4: Customizing Your Layout

Use Canva’s simple drag and drop interface to play around and move your text boxes and graphic elements around until you get things how you’d like them. To change the color of your text or graphics, just click on the text box or graphic and then select the gradient color picking tool in the top left of the editor pane and choose your color.

Other ways to customize:

resize your artwork to play with size, scale, and dimension.
change the opacity of your artwork to add depth or make certain elements pop.
rearrange your text boxes to customize your layout
add a background color or pattern or texture

Additional options in Canva Pro:

If you upgrade to a Canva Pro subscription, a whole host of possibilities open up to your designs!

Upload your own fonts. You can find tons of beautiful fonts on Creative Market or Etsy or find free fonts on DaFont.com or Google Fonts.
Upload custom artwork or use premium artwork from Canva. You can find thousands of options for clipart or artwork to use in your designs on Creative Market.

5: Download Your Designs and Print!

Once you’ve got your designs finalized, it’s time to download and print!

5.1 Print at Home

If you’d like to print them yourself at home, we recommend downloading your design as a PDF file and selecting crop marks and bleeds so you know where to trim your paper.

Tips:

if you’re printing at home, avoid full bleed background colors to save on ink
do a black and white design for cheaper printing at a professional printer

5.2 Print at a Print Shop

If you’d like to print your designs via a professional printer, or a reputable online printing service such as Overnight Prints or VistaPrint, we recommend downloading your design as a high-quality PDF, or PNG or JPG. Depending on what printing service you use, they will have certain file requirements so just be sure to check what you need so you download the best file.

5.3 Print via Canva

You can actually order prints of your designs directly through Canva for a simple and convenient option.

6. Creating Your Other Invitation Pieces

Now that you’ve got your wedding invitation, you can create a matching RSVP card, directions or info card, wedding programs, dinner menu, place cards, table numbers, and so much more with Canva. Just create a new design for each piece, size appropriately, and follow the same steps to build a cohesive wedding suite for your wedding!

Related Reads:

Browse Free Wedding Printables

View all of our free printable wedding collections on our printables page!

View the Collections

Create Your Wedding Invitations with Canva!

Planning a wedding can be expensive, so finding ways to cut costs is essential. But you can easily get beautiful wedding invitations for free with Canva! If you’re a bride on a budget and you’re looking for a way to personalize your wedding for less, DIY is a great option. And Canva is a DIY Design platform that makes it crazy easy to create tons of different types of designs.

If you do opt to create your own invitations and paper goods with Canva, you should feel really proud of yourself! Not only did you use your creativity but you also saved money!

We can’t wait to see what you create with Canva! Be sure to share your creations with us in the community or tag us on Instagram!