Wedding Invitations

19 Black and White Wedding Stationery Designs That Prove This Palette Will Never Go Out of Style

There are wedding trends that announce the year they were born. The blush pinks of the early 2010s. Dusty blue. Sage green. Terracotta. The inevitable butter yellow that's quietly making its entrance. And then there's black and white. It belongs to no particular season. It feels equally at home in a London townhouse, a New York museum, a Tuscan villa or the groom’s parents’ Cotswolds garden.

Over the last decade, we've had the privilege of designing wedding stationery for couples across the world. Some wanted romantic, others editorial. Some dreamed of understated luxury, others of dramatic typography and bold statements. Yet despite wildly different personalities, venues and stories, we keep returning to the same palette.

When color steps aside, every other decision becomes more important. The paper must be extraordinary. The typography must carry emotion. Every millimeter of spacing matters. Every letterpress impression, every vellum overlay, every blind emboss.

These are nineteen of our favorite black and white wedding projects. Together, they make a quiet argument for simplicity.

Exquisite letterpress details from The Curator collection.

Statement envelopes for guest thank you notes.

Black ink doesn't compete.

The best invitations rarely fight for your attention. They simply deserve it.

Black ink on white paper has a remarkable way of slowing people down. Instead of being distracted by color, your eye begins to notice proportions. A beautifully drawn serif. The elegance of a single line of script. The generous space surrounding a pair of names.

Suddenly, typography isn't just carrying information. It becomes the decoration itself.

An oldie but a goodie, fully in lowercase Helvetica.

Luxury is subtraction.

Luxury has a habit of being misunderstood. It's often associated with adding more. More foil. More colours. More embellishment. More layers. In reality, the hardest thing a designer can do is decide what doesn't belong.

Every unnecessary flourish removed gives greater significance to the elements that remain. A single blind deboss can become more captivating than a page filled with ornament. One perfectly chosen typeface can communicate more personality than an elaborate illustration.

Restraint isn't the absence of creativity. It's confidence.

Less is always, always more.

WHITE HAS TEXTURE.

White isn't one color. It can be warm or cool. Crisp or velvety. Smooth or deeply tactile. It can swallow light or gently reflect it. On soft cotton paper, white becomes almost sculptural, revealing subtle impressions that disappear until the card is tilted ever so slightly in your hand. This is where paper stops being a surface and starts becoming part of the design.

One of our most popular, and most endlessly stylish collections, The Editor.

TYPOGRAPHY DESERVES CENTRE STAGE.

Two names. A place. A date. An invitation. There's something deeply romantic about allowing language to carry the emotion.

Throughout these projects you'll notice oversized names stretching confidently across envelopes, tiny lines of carefully composed body copy, expressive scripts dancing beside disciplined modern serifs. Each piece feels different and yet they all rely on exactly the same ingredients.

The quiet restraint of The Poet collection.

QUIET DETAILS HOLD ATTENTION

Some of our favorite moments are the ones people don't notice immediately. The blind emboss that only appears when afternoon sunlight moves across the paper. The vellum overlay that reveals just enough beneath it. The tiny line of gold foil that catches the eye for a second before disappearing again. Design doesn't always need a grand gesture. Sometimes its greatest success is inviting someone to look twice.

Always a crowd pleaser, our square menu format from The Dreamer collection.

Large enough to make a statement, small enough to fit in a clutch - the weekend program from The Novelist collection.

A FEW THINGS WE KNOW AFTER OVER A DECADE DESIGNING WEDDING STATIONERY.

  • Beautiful paper is never trying to impress you.

  • Typography is often the most expressive illustration.

  • Negative space is part of the composition, not what's left over.

  • Simplicity takes longer to design than complexity.

  • Restraint is one of the boldest creative decisions you can make.

  • The smallest details are often remembered the longest.

Planning your own wedding? Explore our semi-custom wedding stationery collections, or get in touch to begin designing something that will feel just as beautiful decades from now as it does on the day it arrives in your guests' hands.

Destination Wedding Invitations

Destination Wedding Invitations

Destination weddings have become increasingly popular over the last decade, and creating destination wedding invitations usually requires an elaborate design process that often involves the close collaboration of the couple & their planning team, the stationery designer, the venue, and other vendors. Because the idea of traveling to Provence, Tuscany, or Cabo to celebrate your love with your friends and family is a fun idea - we have created this list of tips to help guide you through some of the nitty gritty details to consider, to hopefully keep the planning (and printing!) process fun too.

Read More

Square Wedding Invitations

Square Wedding Invitations

If you’re wanting to do something different with your wedding stationery, opting for a square wedding invitation can be a strikingly simple way to stand out. When it comes to design, and more specifically to rethinking traditional design, sometimes the solution is as easy as switching up the format.

In a quick Google or Pinterest search, you’ll notice that most wedding invitations are usually about 5x7 or 6x9 inches and more often than not, in portrait orientation. Occasionally they’re flipped to landscape, perhaps to accommodate a long venue illustration, or simply to match the opening of the envelope so that everything follows the same orientation and does not need to be rotated upon opening. (A consideration perhaps, for only the very obsessive amongst us).

The next most popular shape, especially in recent years - is the arched invitation, and then of course there are the uniquely die-cut formats in organic or geometric forms. It’s rather surprising just how rare the square actually is! So of course we’re all about it, and it is the chosen format for the wedding invitation in our beloved stationery collection, The Editor.

Read More

Minimal Wedding Invitations

Minimal Wedding Invitations

Minimal wedding invitations have become a popular trend over the last decade or two, predominantly for couples seeking a more modern take on their wedding styling and stationery. They are largely characterized by concise and simple wording often typeset in small font sizes, large expanses of white (or negative) space, little to no decorative elements, patterns, or illustrations, and monochromatic, neutral, pale, or muted color palettes. Yum. What’s not to love. 

Read More

Folded Wedding Invitations

Folded Wedding Invitations

When it comes to choosing wedding stationery and particularly wedding invitations, the choice can be overwhelming. A design that speaks to you and matches your personalities and event styling is key, but it’s not only what’s written on the invitation that matters; the way the invitation itself is presented can tell a beautiful story. Folded wedding invitations, such as the ones in our beloved collection The Novelist, offer something striking, unique, and unexpected.


Why choose folded invitations?

There are a number of reasons to choose folded wedding invitations…

Read More

Embossed Wedding Invitations

Embossed Wedding Invitations

First of all, what defines an embossed wedding invitation? People often confuse the words embossing and debossing or use embossed mistakenly to refer to any type of letterpress printing, when in fact these are very different techniques. Embossing requires two print plates or dies - often referred to as the male and female, and the paper is placed between them to create a raised, relief effect when pressure is applied. The embossed text or graphic elements are pushed upwards through the paper, creating a tactile relief and dramatic shadows; perfect for creating striking and memorable wedding stationery.

Embossing can be done with inks, foils, or without color altogether, in which case it is called blind embossing. And blind embossing is our love language. Because of the two print plates which slot into each other, blind embossing allows for a deep impression even without the application of any ink or foil colors.

Embossing is most notably used in Braille - the tactile written language form invented for the visually impaired - which allows readers familiar with the Braille alphabet to interpret words and letters through touch.

Read More