I’ve teased our custom Save the Dates here and on Instagram a few times, so I’m super excited to share them with you all today! In this post I’ll get into the nitty gritty details like how I designed our custom Save the Dates myself, my favorite place to find fun fonts and graphics, what company we used for printing, and more. I also did a similarly detailed post about our wedding party proposal boxes, in case you’re interested. Okay, let’s jump right in.
This post is all about our custom Save the Dates.
Designing Our Custom Save the Dates
Since I’m a full-time graphic designer, I knew that when it came to our wedding stationery, I would design most of it myself. There are obviously tons of templates available online that probably would’ve made my life a lot easier, lol. But I had a really specific vision for these and loved the idea of getting to “brand” our wedding with specific fonts and graphics that we will use on everything wedding-related.
My go-to place to find unique fonts and fun graphics is Creative Market. You can seriously find almost anything on there— from product mockups and fonts, to templates and illustrations. You can even find website themes for your blog or e-commerce site! It’s seriously amazing and pretty affordable. We purchased both of our fonts from Creative Market, as well as a bundle of floral graphics that included the little bouquet you see on our Save the Date card and the pattern on our envelope liners. We knew we wanted an elegant yet whimsical script font, and this one totally fit the bill. The flowers were a late addition to the design, but they really complete it in my opinion. Our wedding is whimsical, romantic garden themed, so flowers are simply a must.
Truly Engaging Reviews: Our Experience With Them
Just like our custom wedding party proposals, we struggled a bit to find a company that would print fully custom Save the Dates. We reached out to a few local print shops and got really high quotes that we weren’t comfortable spending on simple Save the Dates. Finally, we found Truly Engaging, formerly known as MagnetStreet.
Truly Engaging is a stationery site that offers paper goods for all of life’s big moments, including weddings, birthdays, holiday cards and more. They have an option to print your custom design at a really affordable rate, plus they’re almost always on sale! If I remember correctly, they offer two kinds of paper to print on and a few other customization options like paper shapes and size, foil finishes and even embossing. They also offer Save the Date magnets and post cards if that’s more your style! Truly Engaging also offers an affordable option to address your envelopes with both the return address and recipient’s address, which I appreciated.
But I’ve got to be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed with Truly Engaging. I appreciated the affordable price and ultimately love our Save the Dates, but we definitely ran into a couple hiccups with them. The first small issue we had was with their free sample program. Online it says you can order a free printed sample of your design so you can see it IRL before ordering dozens of them. Well it wasn’t clear to us that the samples wouldn’t include the raised foil finish that we really wanted to see to ensure legibility. Apparently they don’t do the foil on samples since it’s just a one-off order, which makes sense, but was a bit frustrating since we specifically ordered the samples to see how the foil looked.
Moving along, we got over the foil issue and decided to go ahead and place our full order. Truly Engaging boasts about their team of professional designers that personally review all designs before they go to print. They look over everything you submitted and send you a final PDF proof to review your order and give the green light to print. Well, whoever was looking over our design decided to make their own amendments to my work, which I really didn’t like. The PDF proof we received had clear errors and differences from what we submitted. Their designer even went so far as to swap out the floral bouquet that we used to something completely different.
After multiple rounds of feedback and even a couple of phone calls to their customer service department, we finally got our proof to match our original artwork, but it was really frustrating that they tried to change it in the first place. They also offered no explanation as to why the design changes were made.
Once we received our order we noticed a couple of small issues with the addressing on our envelopes, like names with accents or special characters not showing up properly. We ended up having to hand-write addresses on a few envelopes that got messed up but that wasn’t the end of the world, just a note to you if you have a lot of guests with accents in their names!
Overall, I would say Truly Engaging is just okay. I don’t regret our choice to use them, but all of the issues that we had with them left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The final product is nice, but the overall service didn’t blow us away. I also have a feeling that the process would’ve been a lot smoother if we had used one of their many pre-designed options.
Other Places to Print Custom Wedding Save the Dates
If my Truly Engaging review turned you off to them and you’re looking for more options for printing, I would say to check out your local print shops first. You never know if you’ll be able to work out a deal with them and it’s always nice to support a small business. Other options include printing through Canva, Zazzle, or popular retailers like Staples or Office Depot. If you have a printer at home or a friend with one, you could also order nice card stock or specialty paper and print them right at home!
This post was all about our custom save the dates.
For more wedding content, you can follow my personal wedding planning journey and more inspirational posts here on the blog, as well as on Instagram and Tiktok.
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