There is a tremendous amount of open source software available on the internet. Open source is free! Which means if you are looking at dabbling in designing invitations or placecards and don’t have InDesign or Adobe Illustrator (or want to splurge on it), you can download a similar program at no cost to you.
Today, I bring to you a design program I have worked with: Scribus. Now, documentation for the program isn’t fabulous, but there are plenty of good tutorials available on the web. I’m definitely not the most design savvy individual, but I’ve been able to figure out some of the very basics of the Scribus without too much trouble. And the benefit is that it is easy to do layouts, when compared to using Microsoft Word.
Here are some screenshots.
A basic document. I changed the dimensions to be the size of our invitation.
What the text editor looks like. It is really easy to edit line by line.
Print preview! You can see the document, as well as what it looks like.
Now, with all free things, there are some drawbacks. Like I said, documentation isn’t necessarily the best. There are some bugs- I’ve found that the text doesn’t always change size/font on the first try. And for some reason, it doesn’t really like dingbats all that much.
That said, Mr. Dahlia and I used it successfully to make a cookbook for our families last Christmas.
Despite those problems, Scribus is free, so it might be worth checking out if you are interested in doing some design work and don’t want to pay for a program.
Great post topic. I was waiting for something like this to come around.
That reminds me–I was looking for a web-based flowchart generator and found this one which also does floor plans.
It’s not specifically designed for doing seating arrangements, but it would certainly work. And if your reception site has architectural elements that will affect layout, it’d probably be even better than a dedicated seating chart app.
I recently ran into paint.net which is very similar to photoshop, but its free. There are a couple quirks with it, but it is very easy to use. This is the program I have used to create my invitations.
That looks really helpful — can’t wait to give it a try. Thanks!!
A tip: The Gimp is an open source photoshop, with plenty of documentation on the net… It’s really great, with the same kind of features that photoshop has!
Inkscape is a free, open source vector graphics editor like Adobe Illustrator. Although I haven’t used it that much yet and can’t really attest to the quality of its documentation.
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Ms. Dahlia, Detroit/Cleveland
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you can also download 30-day free trials of adobe products. i’m planning to design my invites this way. one thing i would be careful about, if going this way, is to save them in non-adobe formats before your 30 days run out (eps, tif, jpg, or pdf). of course, this is less helpful if you haven’t used the programs before because they take awhile to get used to.