You picked your wedding date – yay! Now you need to tell people – but your stationery isn’t ready yet… what to do? Here’s where Save the Date cards come in.

Traditionally, these are printed and sent out via snail mail, but since all my guests had email addresses (yep, even my grandparents!) I decided to send them via E-Mail instead.  Since a number of my invited guests were in Australia, I made sure I got them out so that guests had about 9 months before the wedding date to book flights.

Here’s what I used as our save the date e-card:

I created this card entirely in Photoshop (if you don’t have Photoshop, you could download Gimp – a free image editing program).  When I designed these cards, I already knew that I wanted green in my wedding – but I hadn’t settled on using brown at that point (I was actually planning on using green and white for my wedding, but white didn’t look good on the card, so I used brown instead – which ended up becoming the accent color in my wedding!).

I made the background in one “layer” by making a bunch of different sized and colored circles.  I then selected a photo of us, turned it into black and white, and gave it a brown border (stroke).

The fonts are all a serif font (Bell MT) in lowercase.  The heading uses the green from the large green circle on the bottom left, and I also used this green for our names and wedding date on the bottom right.  If you look closely, you’ll noticed that the first line of our names on top of the photo have been outlined in brown – it just seemed to fade away into the picture too much without the stroke around it.

To send this to our guests, I saved the image optimized for web (about 96kb) and pasted it into an email (there are various ways to do this, depending on your email client).  Into the body of the email, I also typed the main information (our names, wedding date, location, closest airport, and request for current mailing address) – this way anyone reading with images disabled or from their cell phone, could still get the main information.

As long as you create your card with the same dimensions as a regular photograph, you can also save your card as a high-res JPEG and have it printed at Visa Print or any photo printing place, mailing it out as a postcard for your not-so-web-savvy guests.

Will you be sending Save the Date cards to your guests? How will you send them?