Whether it’s for a birthday, a Christmas dinner, a wedding or a drink with colleagues, there is always a reason for a party and it is so nice to receive a personal invitation. Here we tell you how creating invitations in Word works.
Just like you have to go to the farm for the feast, first make sure you have all the ingredients for the design at home. This avoids having to search for images during the layout. You have probably already come up with a sentence or text and the font should also catch the eye. Do you have a personal photo on your hard drive that can serve as the theme for the invitation? Perfect!
If you don’t have your own images, you can use an online photo bank. Enough choice! We list the three most important. Pexels collects photos with a CCO license. CCO stands for Creative Commons Zero. That means you can use and edit the photos for free without any restrictions. Pexels adds new photos every week. The website has an excellent search engine that even works in Dutch.
Also behind Unsplash is a huge community of photographers who generously let their work be used. And on Pixabay you’ll find hundreds of thousands of free photos, vectors, and illustrations. Select the images that seem useful to you for this occasion and download them.
Choose font
Of course you don’t want a font like Arial, Calibri or Godbetter Comic Sans on the front of the card. You will find an endless range of alternatives on the online font banks. We help you on your way with looking up fonts.
There is of course Google Fonts which provides a large library of free and open source fonts. Also websites like www.dafont.com or www.1001freefonts.com divide their collection into different categories. There you can type a sample text to make it easier to judge the result before you click the Downloadbutton clicks.
Install Font
You have just downloaded a zip file containing the font. Such a font can consist of different styles, such as Bold (fat) and Bold-Italic (bold and oblique) and Italic (oblique). Open the zip file and double click on the font you want to install. In a new window you will see a preview of the chosen font in different font sizes.
Click on the button at the top to install. The font is now installed on your computer and can now be found in the font menu of Word.
Template or not
Become has thousands of ready-made online templates that you can edit to your liking. If you do it right, you can adjust the Word template so that no one recognizes the default design from the Microsoft templates anymore. For the invitation we use a template here, for the menu we will start from scratch. So we show both ways, the choice is yours.
Start Word and then use the menu File / New to get to the templates. The number of installed templates is limited, you’d better use the search engine to get online templates. When entering search terms, try to think out of the box. For example, use terms like greeting card, party or invitation. Do not pay attention to the content when going through the proposals, but look at the format and layout. Select the desired template and click To make.
Delete images
We have chosen a design in which two folding cards fit on one A4 sheet. The most important element is the image. This design involves a full-width image. When you fold the card, the image from the front will flow into the back. We don’t want that. You can make it easy on yourself and just fill in the text with your own data.
We want to continue with a personal photo on the front, the back can remain white. A problem with many Word templates is that most elements are fixed in groups. So if you select and delete the current image with the deletebutton, you will see the images on the top and bottom designs disappear at the same time.
We want to prepare the top card first and then copy it down. Right click on the image and use the command Group / Ungroup. Then you delete the image.
Post images
Through Insert / Pictures / Insert pictures from this device import an image that is in the Downloads folder or elsewhere on the hard drive. At first you may see a white frame, apparently with no content. This is because it has not yet been set how the image interacts with the text in the document.
If you right click on that frame and select Text wrapping / Behind text, then the photo will appear. Drag the photo to the right side of the card. When you select the image, the new tab will appear Image format. There you select the option on the right crop. Crop marks will appear around the photo as you drag to indicate the boundaries of the photo. Click on the photo to confirm.
Text over image
Make it easy on yourself and remove the text on the front of the template, because it is in a table. Just select the table border and click the deletebutton. Then place with Insert a new text box in which you format the text with the font you downloaded. In the tab Form division, which appears when you click in the text box, choose a shape fill color, a shape outline, and a text color.
How do you make the background of a text box transparent? Right-click the text box (not the text) and choose Format Shape. In the beam Format Shape join in Colour the slider on 100% Transparency. Of course you can also make the text box less transparent by sliding the slider to 50% to put.
Inside
Now you can format the inside of the card, which is on page two of this template. Just type in the text boxes of the template, you don’t have to clear them. You can’t even make a mistake when entering the date. If you’re on the subject Select date click, a small date picker will appear. Also fill in the location and with this a map is ready.
Duplicate and Print
Transfer the formatted elements to the second card that is on the same A4 sheet. As for the front, select the photo and text with the Ctrlkey pressed. Then use the right mouse button and choose the command group. Then you copy the group, you delete the old image and the text on the second card and you paste the copied group on it.
Also change the inside text on the second card. Save the image and load sturdy paper into the printer. Be sure not to use single-sided photo paper, as the ink will not adhere to the back. Double-sided photo paper is available that produces excellent results.
Now your invitation is ready to be sent. Bet nobody says no to it?
