We picked our date in a parking lot outside a barn we ended up not booking. I wrote it on the back of a gas receipt so I would not forget, then lost the receipt, then remembered it anyway because it was my cousin’s birthday plus one week. That receipt is the whole origin story of our save the dates.
Here is the thing about these little cards. They go out months before anything else, so they set the tone, and they are also the easiest piece to over-think into oblivion. I sat with eleven tabs open one Sunday comparing fonts and got nowhere. Then a friend who got married the year before told me to just pick one with good spacing and move on. She was right.
Below are the ones I would hand a friend who texts me asking where to start. Some I used, some I printed test pages of and bullied my groom into voting on. A couple of the links are affiliate links, so if you grab one it tosses a little something my way. Does not cost you a cent.
A few of the links below are affiliate links. If you print something from one, it tosses a little something my way and costs you nothing.
The one I start everyone on
When a friend says she has zero design sense, this is what I send her. You drop your names and the date in, the layout holds its shape, and nothing slides around when you swap the month. I typed ours in at my kitchen counter while pasta water boiled over, and even distracted I could not really break it.
I printed a test sheet on plain copy paper, taped it to the cabinet, and walked past it for a day. Reading it cold like that is how I caught that our last names were too tight together.
My one gripe. The default date format is the long spelled-out kind, and I wanted just numbers, so I had to go change that in three spots. Five minutes, but annoying when you assume it is one field.
For when paper felt too flimsy
My maid of honor went a different route than me and did laser cut cards, and I got to hold one before she mailed them. They have weight. You feel the cutout shapes with your thumb, which a flat printed card just does not give you.
She ordered hers cut at a small shop two towns over because she did not trust her own craft cutter for the fine lines, and honestly she was right to. The thin parts of these designs tear if your blade is dull.
The catch she warned me about was envelopes. The cutout edges snag on regular paper envelopes going in, so she lined hers with tissue. Pretty, but that is an extra step on every single one when you are doing eighty of them at the table at 10pm.
If you live inside your phone like I do
I built half my wedding paper goods on my phone in waiting rooms, and this is the kind of thing that made that possible. You open it, the pieces are already placed, and you nudge the text around with your thumb. I did a full draft of mine sitting in the car outside a dentist office.
What I liked was that it did not punish me for changing my mind. I swapped the photo three times and the spacing just absorbed it instead of shoving everything off the page.
One thing. The colors that ship with it lean very soft, almost washed out on my screen, and they print even lighter. I bumped the contrast before I sent it to the copy shop on Mercer, because the first proof looked faded from across the room.
The backup I almost used instead
This was the runner-up the night my groom and I voted. We had two tabs open, both Canva ones, and we kept flipping between them for an hour. This one had the cleaner type, the other had the photo slot we wanted, and that is the only reason it lost.
I still made a friend use it last spring. She did her whole set in an afternoon, ordered prints from a drugstore an hour away, and they came back better than mine did. Stung a little.
My nitpick is the text boxes. They are grouped in a way where if you grab one to move it, you grab three, and it took me a minute to figure out how to ungroup them. Once I did, smooth sailing.
The one a guest stuck to her fridge for a year
A coworker of mine did wood for hers and I still have it. It has been on my fridge under a magnet since well before her actual wedding, which tells you something. Paper save the dates go in a drawer. This one did not.
She told me she ran a couple test cuts on scrap first because the wood grain catches the laser differently depending on the piece, so two came out darker than the rest. She kept the dark ones for family.
The downside is mailing. These cost real money to ship because of the weight and you cannot cram one in a normal envelope, so she hand-delivered the local ones and only mailed the out-of-towners. Cut her postage problem in half, doubled her driving.
What I actually ended up sending
This is close to the one we mailed. Soft florals around the edge, our names in the middle, the date below. I am not a flowers-everywhere person but the border on this stays out of the way and lets the text breathe, which is the whole game on a small card.
I printed ours at the copy shop on Mercer because my home printer streaks anything with color in it. Forty cards, cardstock around 110lb, done while I waited and read three pages of a magazine I did not buy.
The one fix I made first. The florals run right to the trim line, so on my test print at home the petals got clipped on one corner. I scaled the whole thing down maybe four percent before the real run so nothing important sat at the very edge.
Buy once if you are doing the whole set
By the time my sister-in-law planned hers she had learned from watching all of us, and she went straight for a bundle so the save the date matched everything that came after. Same look on the card, the invite, the little details. No mismatched fonts six months apart.
She spread the work out, did the save the dates in March and did not touch the rest until summer, which is the right way to do it. The matching was already baked in so future her had less to decide.
Where it bit her was the laser cut pieces in the bundle. Same fragile thin lines as the standalone ones, so she still needed a clean blade and patience, and she still snagged a couple envelopes. The bundle saves you on design, not on the fiddly cutting.
Questions Brides Ask Me
What should a save the date card include?
Honestly less than you think. Your two names, the date, and the city. That is it. People just need to know not to book a beach trip that weekend.
I tried to cram our venue and a website and a little story onto ours and it got cluttered fast. A friend told me to save the details for the real invite, and she was right. The save the date is the heads up, not the whole agenda.
Do I need a photo?
Nope. We did not use one and nobody asked. I almost added a photo of us from a hiking trip and then realized I hated how I looked in it, so we went text only and it was fine.
That said, if you have a photo you actually love, it makes the card feel like yours instead of a stock thing. My cousin used one and people put it on their fridges. Just do not force it if your best photo is three years old.
What size are they?
Most of the ones I dealt with were the standard postcard-ish size, the kind that fits a normal small envelope. Ours were on the smaller end and I liked that, less to print, less to mail.
I learned to check this before printing the hard way. I set a batch to the wrong size once and ended up with cards that did not fit the envelopes I already bought. Match the card to the envelope first, then print. Saves a 9pm run to the craft store.
Before You Hit Print
If you are staring at fifty tabs right now, just close them. Pick one with spacing you like, print a single test page on plain paper, tape it to something, and look at it tomorrow. You will know.
Mine had the city spelled wrong on the first run and I caught it on the fridge before I printed forty. That test page is the only reason this is a funny story and not an expensive one.