Best Elegant Fonts For Your Wedding Invites
Have you ever scrolled through a website or walked past a sign and thought to yourself, “that is a really great font”.
Chances are a designer spent a lot of time deciding how that font would look — the height of the letters, the spacing, and the style. Fonts are one of the most important decisions in any readable design. Typography, or the style and appearance of printed matter, is a pretty exact science. It’s subject to little unknown rules and considerations that make a good design great.
So what does this mean for you in the quest for elegant fonts?
Your suite of wedding stationery such as Save-the-Dates, RSVPs, Invitations, and Escort Cards will all have fonts. Since you probably wouldn’t use Comic Sans MS to announce your black-tie reception, what these fonts looks like matters!
After all, it helps clue your guests into what to expect for your upcoming nuptials, and therefore decide what to wear!
Finding Your Elegant Font
If your wedding is set to be the most elegant affair of the season, it’s important that every part of your wedding reflect that. This includes your wedding stationery. Whether you have a designer on hand to help you with your dream design, a premade template or are going the DIY route, it’s important to know what makes a font elegant and how to pair it with additional fonts for the best impact.
Note: A font is the physical collection of letters, numbers, and symbols. The term ‘typeface’ is used to describe how a font looks. So, you might say, “I downloaded the font, it’s a very elegant typeface”.
If you search online for the best elegant fonts, all kinds of styles might come up. Some with serif (the little projections on the end of the letters), some sans-serif, and some even script.
More than the type of font, this is because what makes a font elegant is the clean lines, simplicity, and impact. This means you have a lot of room to work with your invitations to make them elegant and uniquely you!
Playing with Pairings
Chances are on you’ll need more than one font for a wedding invite. After all, wording the entire card in a sprawling script might mean no one is able to read it! This is where the art of font pairings and font duos come in. If you’re selecting your own font, there are a few things to keep in mind when pairing fonts:
- You’ll want to pair a serif font (projections on the end of the letters) with a sans serif. Fonts will often clash or compete for attention if they are too similar.
- You don’t have to use a ton of different fonts to get your message across. Use variants of the same font. For example, popular elegant font Bodoni has a Condensed Version, a bold Black version, and a Compressed version. You can also use Bodoni in bold, italics or uppercase letters to change up the look subtly.
- Consider the order in which information is read, based on the typeface position, scale, and style. For example, the reader’s eye will be drawn to a large, bold script at the top of the invitation before they see the petite date and time towards the bottom.
To Serif or Not to Serif?
Depending on the style and tone of your event, you may want to use a serif font for as the primary font. Serif fonts tend to be considered more elegant, and slightly more old-fashioned than modern, rounded lines of a sans-serif.
However, that’s not to say you can’t make a serif font work to your advantage for a modern or even minimalist wedding. Serifs are very popular in print and editorial work, and there are several hubs available for custom-designed serifs so that you can find exactly what you’re looking for.
DIY Invitation Design
If you’re taking the reins on your wedding invitation design (fonts and all), one of the best resources to take a look at is creativemarket.com. Creative Market is a giant marketplace where designers all over the world sell their work. This includes invitation templates, logos, and fonts. It even showcases abstract pieces for your designs like watercolor stains, brush strokes, flora patterns, wallpapers and more!
For a nominal fee, you can purchase the rights to everything you need to design your invitations and wedding stationery.
In particular, there are several packages containing elegant font duos to get you started. Here are some of our picks from Creative Market:
1) Beautiful Grace
by Ian Barnard
Beautiful Grace pairs a script with a serif font. The script is hand-drawn by designer Ian Barnard and smooth with flowing lines, and the serif font is clean, bold, and elegant. This set is perfect for wedding stationery!
2) Prague
Prague consists of the pairing of two sans-serif fonts, but the contrast is gorgeous. One is an offset outline of the text, and one is a bold, clean sans-serif that give a refreshingly modern look to a wedding invitation. Purchase of the font duo also includes several line-drawn floral appliques for invitation design.
3) Melvin and Emily Font Duo
Melvin and Emily is another font duo that pairs a clean serif with an elegantly scrawled script. This font duo set also comes with several alternative characters and ligatures that can easily be put on any letter (the long, flowing line at the beginning and end of the letters.)
Free Elegant Fonts
For the brides on a budget, there are several resources available for free elegant fonts. Our favorite is FontSquirrel.com, which has fonts available for download right to your computer! Once installed, you can easily open a font in PhotoShop, Paint, or Microsoft Word.
Here are some of our favorite elegant font FontSquirrel picks.
Invite Designs with Elegant Fonts
Busy brides with little time to work on invitation designs may opt for the done-for-you approach. We totally understand! That’s why we rounded up our favorite invitation designs that use elegant fonts from our friends at Minted.
1) Nature’s Greens
by Susan Moyal
2) Classic Elegance Foil
3) My Type Letterpress
by Lena Barakat
4) Gilded Shore
5) Ornate Deco
by GeekInk
Let us know in the comments below which elegant fonts you choose for your stationery!
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Meredith
Despite her dreamy wedding blogger lifestyle, Meredith's day job is running ClassicVeils.com and a full-time mom to an active toddler. If she could, Meredith would spend her days taking cruises, helping animals in need, and watching Big Brother!
