Weddingbee boards

We sent STD postcards from Vistaprint.  We were acutlaly really happy with the quality.  They seemed to do fine going through the mail, the only thing I didn't like was since the front of the postcard was dark, the PO added a sticker along one of the sides with a barcode.  But it peeled right off and didn't damage the postcard so it was fine. 

Our save the date postcards worked out just fine- designed on the computer and printed on postcard stock at Office Max.  They had a couple smudges here and there after mailing, but nothing that kept them off anyones' fridges.  I used a corner rounder on them too and no problems with that either.

Mine got fairly beaten up - I saw our STD at my parents' house and was a little disappointed to see it beaten up, especially because they are the high quality overnightprints ones.

I'm worried, too! We're doing postcard RSVPs, and I'm a bit concerned with them being possibly illegible (or torn to shreds) when they come back to me. I'm going to have to get one of those invisible ink pens to track them, I think.

We did the design work and then printed our STD's on standard cardstock at an office supply place. I felt comfortable with this approach because I've used it several times at work with last minute promotions where we machine our mail in the office so I've seen that it processes fine via standard machine processes. We only heard of one that came through in bad shape, and were able to inspect them on several family member's fridges over various holidays, etc.  That said here are my 3 suggestions:

1. Use heavier card stock if you can.  In retrospect I would have used 120 lb (perhaps chipboard or coldpress watercolor type paper) instead of 90 lb. card stock.
2. Work your return address into the design on the back.  We didn't think to include a return address so we have no idea what happened to the 2 that never made it to their destinations.  I recently put together a set for a work event and we ran our return address down the center of the back area and used it to seperate the send to address area and the message area and had no problem with the undeliverable ones coming back to me.
3. Use an envelope for any out of the country cards.  The one we sent to London never showed up, but the one to Finland did and in great shape.

If in doubt make a few protypes and mail them to yourself and a friend/family member who lives cross country and see what happens. :)

I did the big Vistaprint postcards for my STDs.  Fortunately I checked and found out the postage to mail them was the same as for an envelope . . . so I ended up getting the cheap, but very functional envelopes that Vistaprint sold.  I still made my cards postcards, but this way, with my hand addressed envelopes, I didn't have to worry about people thinking they were junk mail! The envelopes (for 100) only cost me $2 more.

yep, we used OfficeMax although I perfer using Office Depot but the Max was closer to our house.

I set them up in Adobe InDesign to use an 8.5 x 11 page divided into 1/4ths and if you make sure to leave a gutter down the cut lines then you can just have OfficeMax/Depot make the two cuts for you. I saved it off as 2 seperate PDF files (Front.pdf and Back.pdf) because that seemed to be easier for the guy to understand.  Print them all with front.pdf, then flip them over and print them all with back.pdf :)

My only complaint is that OfficeMax can't print to the edge of the page so I had to redesign my cards to have a border on the edge, so if you want full color to edge you'd need to use larger paper and have them cut the edges off.   

PS.  We sent ours end of Jan last year for our June wedding...because we couldn't make up our minds. 

I don't think it's that big of a threat - we've gotten postcards from others in the mail that got to us fine. We also send out postcards to people when we travel, especially overseas, and the ones I've seen didn't look too bad.

The only thing I would watch out for is if there are a lot of really light colours or white space - they could get dirty-looking pretty easily. 

Some of ours got kind of beat up, which was sad to see. We sent one to ourselves (and we forgot to put our apartment number on it so it was actually a return to sender -- ahahahaah!) and it looked pretty bad, mostly because there was some kind of black streak strategically placed over my face.  But I have heard from other people that mostly the edges were a little bent, dinged, etc.

yep, both send to and return to addresses should be on the "message" side of the postcard.