Weddingbee Blog

Alright, a few bees (…OK two of you) asked for a tutorial on how I made our STDs and although I made them a while back, I’ll try to share in my process.

A refresher of our STDs:

I will preface this post by saying: I am not a graphic designer. At all. Check with the company you plan to order your STDs from for any design specifications. If it seems confusing or as if they are speaking a foreign language, you may consider asking about design services.

First things first, I copied the image from the website we planned to buy our magnets from (we used magnets.com with great success, but they are available from other places as well), and re-sized it to fit the printing specifications (in this case 3.5 x 4.5).

Because I’m super awesome with my computer skills (har), I copy-pasted this bad boy into MS Paint so I could delete all the word innards. It was important to me to have my words fit the standards from the company as closely as possible, so I wanted my words to fit in the preexisting text boxes. I have no idea if a custom cut costs extra, so definitely check this out if you’re interested.

Next, I put this image into Word. At this point, I should admit how difficult the following was for me. I originally wanted to make this in Illustrator, but could not for the life of me figure out how to make the words vertical for the boxes (I can do it now…I think). After a few days (literally) of trying, I gave up and made everything in Word using text boxes. I put the text boxes over the image in Word and filled them in with the words and fonts I had oh-so carefully chosen.

(obviously edited)

Once I had all my words in place, I deleted the underlying image so I had nice, clean image of just our words (the lines were not wanted for printing/cutting purposes).

For the frame portion, I created a box using the dimensions we needed in Paint (yes, we’re back to Paint). After making the box the color I wanted, I cut out the middle portion for the words in the size needed. Then I inserted the frame into Word to add text boxes to the frame (you could also do this in Paint, but I choose to make things as difficult on myself as possible).

(I wish this was our wedding website)

Finally, I saved the images as PDFs, as requested by the magnet company, and held my breath as we placed the order for our magnets.

I should note that some minor editing was done by the company to comply with their printing standards. A proof was emailed to us with their edits, and after giving the email equivalent of a thumbs up, our magnets were printed and shipped to our hot little hands so we could distribute them to our wedding guests.

I hope this helps anyone else wanting to make similar STDs! Of course, if you have questions, feel free to PM me and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Anyone going to make magnet STDs? What words would you include in your magnet? Did I leave any important words out?