Weddingbee boards

I used Illustrator and InDesign for all of my wedding stationery.  If you have access to Illustrator I would definitely take advantage of it!  You should create the entire invitation in Illustrator as opposed to a combination of Illustrator and Word.  Illlustrator actually has much more type capabilities than Word does.  That said, I know the progam can be daunting if you are learning it for the first time on your own.  Some pointers:

1) Set the document dimensions to the size that you want the invitation to be.  This way, if you create crop marks automatically in the Print dialog they will be in the right place so you can trim to your desired size easily, or if you send to a professional press, they will get the dimensions right.

2) You can place images into your Illustrator file using the "Place" function.  You can place anything from native Photoshop files (.psd) to .eps, .jpeg, .png, etc.  Just make sure any bitmapped images are at least 300 dpi in resolution so they print clearly, with no pixels.

3) You can also use the pen tool in Illustrator to draw your own vector graphics.  This is what I did for mine!

There's a ton more but I hope this at least can help you to get started.  Have fun!!!

Just a note-- if you like a rubber stamp graphic but don't want to stamp it a million times, you can always take a digital photo of the stamp image, and import the graphic into your design program. That's what I did in Photoshop.

And yes, Photoshop can be a pain if you're trying to make outlines of boxes, etc., but I had no problems with the crispness of my text or graphics, even though it wasn't vector based.

I used AI as well, for invites and all our other wedding printed products. I used it in combination w/ Photoshop for more complicated photo manipulation, such as for our custom printed CDs.

A tip I posted in on an earlier WB blog post:  When you're using photo files, they tend to be ginormous (anywhere from 1-5MB, sometimes more). If you use a lot of them, you can end up with a super bamboocha sized final file -- like 100MB! It's almost impossible to print something that big out or submit it to a printing house (unless you're a pro and have FTP, etc.). I tore my hair out about this until my designer friend showed me the light. 

Make a copy of your photo files and resize them (keep them 300 dpi) to closer to the size they'll print at. (i.e., most photos are 4"x6", but you're probably not going to use them that big -- you can resize to 1"x2" or whatever) Just make sure you don't save them SMALLER than what you intend, 'cause while you can shrink them on your layout, you can't make them bigger -- not nicely, anyway. Use those resized, smaller, photo files to create your final document.  

For some crazy reason, if you copy/paste or use the "place" function using the original, large files, and then reduce the size of your photo in layout, the program still "thinks" that it's a 5MB file, even though the picture now looks like half the size.

Hope this helps others!