Wedding invitation design is one of the most creative areas of print design today. Talented designers really pull out all the stops and create some amazingly inspirational pieces. Keep reading to see fifty astounding examples of wedding invitation design.

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Trends

Before we launch into our huge list of invitations, it will be helpful to point out a few trends. These will help feed your creativity and teach you what you can expect clients to be looking for in a professional design.

Letterpress

By far the most popular trend I came across was letterpress printing. This relief printing technique uses an inked, raised printing plate to create an imprint effect on text and images.

The result is a high quality, classic feel that is absolutely perfect for wedding invitations. It’s not always the cheapest route but it’s certainly a good way to impress your guests.

Vintage Typography

Another extremely popular trend is using a typographic treatment as the primary design feature. These layouts typically mix several types of old style typefaces and incorporate interesting word shapes and ornate line graphics.

As you can see in the example above, it’s hard to beat a good vintage type treatment. There’s just something so undeniably eye-catching about it!

Custom Illustrations

If you’re good with a pencil, wedding invitations provide the perfect outlet for your artistic genius. Brides and grooms often love something personalized with a comically drawn version of themselves.

Recipients of these invitations will instantly know that the couple went out all on custom design rather than simply buying a cheap template.

The Whole Package

Don’t stop at mere invitations, wedding clients require lots of printed materials and getting them all in one place with one coherent theme is an enticing deal.

In addition to invitations you can throw in “Save the Date” cards, RSVP cards, custom envelopes, maps to the church and reception locations, wedding day programs and “Thank You” cards.

Unique Packaging

If your clients have a decent budget to play with, try putting some creative thought into how you present the invitations. The awesome example above uses a pop-open can containing the invitation. Guests are encouraged to then bring the can to the wedding and tie it to the back of the bride and groom’s car for that classic “just married” look.

The Invitations

Wedding Cards by Tim Van Damme

Vintage Travel Wedding Invite by Katrina Sirmon

Pennsylvania Wedding by Lydia Nichols

Wedding Invite – final letterpress result by Boris Forconi

Wedding Invitation by Joshua Krohn

Wedding Invitation by Gedy Rivera

Wedding Invite – Close Up by Josh Sullivan

“I Do!” by Allison Grayce Nold

Invites by Matt Braun

My Wedding Invite System by Gaelyn Jenkins

My wedding invitation by Vikifloki

Wedding invitation by J3fton

Wedding Invitation by XtrDesign

Wedding Invitations by Kostadin Kostadinov

Wedding Invite by Samantha Wiley

Wedding Invitation by Peterbowen

wedding invitation by FireFlyGa

Andrew & Aly’s Wedding Invitations by Seth Nickerson

Brooke and Michael Save the Date by Ghostly Ferns

Jeslyn and Chris Wedding Invite by Emory Cash

Ludwig-Allmett Wedding Package by Primaluxe

“Did she say yes?” – Wedding Invitation by Chris Trivizas

Martha’s Vineyard Wedding Invitation by Sarah Parrott

Wedding Invitations by Phaedra

Typography Inspired Wedding Invitations by Sarah Parrott

Wedding Invitation .01 by Wormsinfected

Wedding Invitation by RafaelVictor

Wedding Invites by Matthew Muller

Set Sail Wedding Invitations by Sarah Parrott

Genna + Clark Wedding Suite by Andrea Mentzer

Wedding Invites by Skylar Hartman

Wedding Invite 1 by Justin W. Siddons

Our Letterpress Wedding Invitations by Matt Omohundro

Sydney Wedding Invites by Greig Anderson

Tying the Knot – RK+MM Wedding Invitations by Urban Influence

Wedding Invitation by Wundercloud

Ashley + Kevin Letterpress Wedding Invitations by Matthew Duerksen

Wedding Invitations by Jeremiah Shaw

Wedding Invite by disturbance

I Do’s Wedding Invitation by Eric Carver

“Crete” – Wedding Invitation by Chris Trivizas

Wedding Card by Peter Becker

Mel & Joe by Nick Wavish

My Wedding Invitation

Vintage garden wedding invitations by Luke Morgan

Wedding Invite by Sophia Tarasova

Y+S wedding by Farah Assir

Tarjetas de Nuestra Boda by burun DANGA

Beñat y Ainhoa by La caja de tipos

Wedding Invitation by Nicole Ziegler

Conclusion

Weddings are an incredibly special event and are a pleasure to be a part of as a designer or photographer. They provide an amazing opportunity to hone your “human-focused” design skills as you get to know the bride and groom and try to translate their personalities to a finished design.

Leave a comment below and let us know which of the invitations above you liked best. Also be sure to leave a link to any awesome invitations you’ve designed!

Today we’ve scoured Ads of the World and come up with fifty particularly creative billboards, bus stops, subway ceilings and more. If you need a fresh blast of creativity to boost your next project, take a look!

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Billboards

The quintessential element of outdoor advertising is of course the billboard. The medium is an interesting one. You have a huge amount of space that needs to be utilized properly so that it can be understood very quickly to people traveling by at potentially high speeds.

Some great ideas you’ll see below include illusions of people interacting with the sign in some way, breaking out of the bounds of the sign and into 3D space and even flipping the sign upside down just to get people to read it!

Auckland Transport: Kids see roads differently

Redhook: Commando

3M’s Post-it Super Sticky Notes: Royal Wedding ad

BUT: Snail

The translation on this one is pretty rough but the visual of the person in bed doubling as a snail is pure genius.

Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort:

Ranfurly Frontier Lager: Bacon

McDonald’s: Clock Billboard

McDonald’s stands out as one company with really strong outdoor advertising. You’ll see their stuff again and again throughout this post simply because I really liked almost everything I saw from them.

Mercedes Benz: Right Brain / Left Brain, 5

Webroot Internet Security: Broccoli

Colorado State Patrol: Billboard Collision

ENO Fruit Salt: Flood

This one is a little difficult to see at first, but that’s what’s so clever. It looks like a flooded plain but upon closer inspection you see that it’s really food floating in stomach acid, a nasty but great mental picture of “disaster relief” stomach medicine.

Utah Department of Public Safety: Motorcycle Safety Campaign, Bones

Tony Divino Toyota: Upside-Down

TV3: Law & Order outdoor lamp

This one is really clever, it’s likely just a concept but the play between 2D and 3D is really great.

Pizza Capers: Will he get out of the woods?

DHL: For all your heavyweight shipments

NZ pure beer: Chemistered

Jim Beam: Fridge

McDonald’s: Come as you are

Donatos Pizza: Newscaster

It seems to be pretty common to have the characters in your billboard or sign interacting with another next to it. It’s a great little trick that grabs your attention because it’s so unexpected. It’s also just fun to imagine that the people in the signs are alive!

McDonald’s: Billboards 200m-197m

Fiat 500: Panda

Nutrisoda: Flying pig

Papaya King: Housewife

Motor Accident Commission (MAC): Cock

Kaiser Permanente: Bubbles

MLK Dream Weekend: Discrimination OOH

Wyoming Department of Health: Messenger

This one is part of a series inserting “secondhand smoke” into common cliches that refer to death or killing.

AT&T Yellow Pages: Pest control

Denver Water: Hose

Transit Shelters

In many ways, you can have a lot more fun with a transit shelter than a billboard. The general assumption is that you will have lots of time to impress or interact with the viewer as they sit there bored and waiting for their ride.

I particularly like the Google Street View and Caribou Coffee ideas, both conceptually transform the bus stop into something unexpected and familiar.

Bring The Billboard To Life

Caribou Coffee: Ovens out of transit shelters

Absolut: Bloody bus stop

Chapel Bar: Mary

Google Street View: Google claims the streets

McDonald’s: Night

Miscellaneous

This section contains a bunch of different ideas. Some are simple small signs, others take everyday objects like cars and turn them into advertising. These really represent the “out of the box” thinking that famous agencies like BBDO are known for.

Washington’s Lottery: Scratch it good

Hotwheels: Curl

Hotwheels has a number of really great outdoor ads. This one makes the road look like a loop on a hotwheels track, which would be a fantastic illusion from far away.

Barbados Yellow Pages: Paint The Town Yellow

7-Eleven, Slurpee: Party Animals

This one is a solid play on words: Party animals. Get it?

Leica: Sharpest Details, Wood

With this one it’s hard to tell what’s going on in the small preview but it’s actually pretty neat. Leica has a series of signs with a close-up shot of the material that the sign is hung on, a great way to show off the power of the camera in a way that feels very real to the viewer.

Zoo Zurich: More Space for the Big Ones, Horizontal

Rädda Barnen (Save the Children): The Lottery of Life, Sierra Leone vs Sweden

This is another one that’s part of a series. The images and messaging is quite powerful. Often, advertisers use humor to get their message across but the same sort of though processes can be used to create something that is quite serious and thought-provoking.

CNN: Stories with the full background, 3

Coca-Cola: Straw, Posters

Nintendo Wii: Never play alone again

This seems like it targets a fairly small audience but the idea is a solid one that would no doubt make you smile and consider picking up a Wii on the way home.

Doom & Dickson: Swank

Berlin Discos: Bass

Panasonic nose trimmer: Baldy

The Economist: Plugs

Lay’s: Potatoes Installation

AC Delco service centres: Mechanic

San Diego Zoo: Painting

McDonald’s: Sort your head out

Conclusion

I hope you’ve found these outdoor advertising examples to be inspiring. Whether or not you actually do any outdoor advertising, you can easily pick up some good tricks for your own work.

Leave a comment below and let us know which examples were your favorite!

1. Semantic Horizontal Form

This form is coded in a semantic way and the elements are positioned next to eachother except for the last fieldset which spans the full width of the form below the 3 top fieldsets. It’s been tested in FF1.x, IE6 and Opera8. (looks a little quirky in IE5.x but still usable)

2. Nice Forms

A great form, with graphical elements and colour to create a different and unique look. All done with CSS and semantic coding.

3. StylePhreak Simple CSS Form

A simple form with regular alignment and unique lines to break up the different sections. This works well as a great base to start your own custom form from.

4. Veerle’s Blue CSS Form

A simple blue form with rounded background corners, all styled in CSS and XHTML. The layout is pixel perfect, and the images can be customized to match your own requirements.

5. Who Says CSS Forms Can’t Be Pretty?

A unique form with soft background images to complement the fields. It highlights many form possibilities, including a pop-up calendar for choosing a date. A related tutorial also accompanies the example.

5. Man in Blue: Form Examples

Here I’ve made each fieldset extend the full width of the page. The main styling that’s going on is the positioning of the form elements within the fieldsets. Because each element is contained inside a label tag, you can just float labels left, give them a bit of margin, and they line up horizontally (moving to the next line if there’s not enough width).

6. CSS Play – A Form with Style

Forms are not very friendly when it comes to CSS and each browser has its own way of handling them. Styles that work in one browser will not work in another, so depending on which browser you are using you will see a slightly different interpretation.

7. The Form Garden

This is a generic web form containing all the different fields and layouts available in FormAssembly.com. Use this form to make sure your theme works well with any type of web form.

8. Prettier Accessible Forms

The most important part of a form is the HTML we use to build it. Fortunately, HTML gives us a nice assortment of tags to build our forms in an accessible way. These are fieldset, legend, and label.

9. HTML Form Effects with CSS

For this tutorial you should already be familiar with HTML forms and the various elements and attributes. You should also have a basic understanding of Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)

10. A 2 Column CSS Form Layout

Websites have become less accessible and more complex over time according to recent studies. Learn how to buck the trend by creating fast, accessible CSS forms that work with modern browsers and gracefully degrade.

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