Choosing Fonts for Wedding Invitations

When you begin making choices about your invitations, you'll probably first be thinking about the design, the paper color, the ink color, etc. Chances are the one thing you won't give much consideration to is the font style.

However, choosing the right font for your invitations is just as important as all of those other decisions. In fact, it may be even more important because bad font choices could cause your invitations to be practically unreadable, which defeats their purpose.

Font Styles

When you are choosing a font, you need to select something that will match the style of your wedding. That's critical. If you're having a formal or even a semi-formal wedding with very traditional wedding invitations, then you'll want to choose a script font.

Script fonts are meant to mimic hand-written letters. Although not included in standard word processing programs usually, Sacker's English Script is a beautiful choice. Other good choices would include Lucia BT, Vivaldi, or Edwardian Script. Regalia is very nice as well, although it is less formal-looking than some of the other scripts in this category. It strikes a nice balance between flourishes and readability.

Traditional Wedding Invitations

If you're having traditional invitations, but you want something a little less fancy, you could always opt for Garamond. This is a very simple font but it has an elegance that works well on wedding invitations.

For less traditional invitations and/or more informal weddings, you can feel free to play around with your font choices a little more. Lucida Handwriting is a good example. This particular font closely resembles casual cursive writing. It's very pretty but not formal enough for traditional invitations. Book Antiqua and Papyrus are two other examples which could work well.

If you're using a professional printer for your invitations, then your font choices will be limited to what he or she uses. However, if you are creating your own invitations or using a graphic designer, you'll usually have fewer limitations. Because the Internet contains thousands of font styles – many available for free download – you could easily spend days browsing through everything available before finding the right font for you. The good news is with that much selection you're almost guaranteed to find a style you love.

And remember you should avoid using more than two to three font styles on your invitation. If you keep changing up every time you go to a new line, the beauty of the fonts is going to be lost and the results will look more like a sample of fonts than an actual elegant invitation.

Also, steer clear of the most commonly used fonts – Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New. Your wedding invitations are too special for everyday fonts.

Font Sizes

Font size varies depending on font style. Basically, 12 point Courier New is not the same size as 12 point Times New Roman. What would be the ideal font size for one would be unreadable in the other. The same is true for almost all of the font styles, particularly the script types.

If you are using a professional printer, he or she will make the necessary adjustments to the font sizing so you get a nice, readable look on your invitations. That's part of what you're paying him or her to do. If you're using a graphic designer, he or she will probably assist you with this as well.

Now if you're creating your own wedding invitations at home, your best bet is to play around with the sizes. First, choose the longest line from your invitation's wording. Then try making it different sizes. Start at around 18 point but avoid going larger than 22 point – this is the same range most professional printers use. Somewhere between those extremes you'll find the best size for your invitations.