Ask Slashdot: Techie Wedding Invitation Ideas? 399
Qa32 writes "I am getting married in a few months and being a hardcore techie I wanted to come up with some novel way of making my wedding invite that will truly have even my mom say, 'wow, that was cool.' Has anyone out there done anything similar, or have you thought of something similar you'd like to share? I already have a few: have QR codes, have some basic embedded circuit/plate with wire leads that maybe plays a song when you connect a battery, have a way to turn up a display LCD, etc."
LED glowing heart invitation (Score:5, Informative)
My friends invited me with one of these. http://youtu.be/bsdCeiae7Mo [youtu.be]
In the comments, he briefly describes the design.
My experience... (Score:5, Informative)
As someone that tried to be "a bit different" with my own wedding invitations it's perhaps worth sharing some details of the experience.
All of our invitations included a business-card with a URL on one side and a unique username and password on the other. With this the guests could access our wedding website, where the they could indicate their attendance, get directions, etc. Since we knew which guests had each username we could customise what was displayed to the particular guest and the "level" of their invitation - pre-populating the RSVP page with their names, allowing them to enter their "+1"s only if their invite happened to include them, and only showing the directions to the event they had been invited.
Unfortunately, this approach confused a surprising number of people who either didn't bother to visit the URL on the card, didn't realise that they needed to detach and turn over the business card in order to find their username/password, or just assumed that since there were no RSVP or location details included with the physical invite, that it was simply a "save-the-date" and that further details would follow later. Even some of the more "tech-savvy" people had problems, and in the end we had to do far more chasing-up than we perhaps would have done had we relied on the more traditional invitation.
With this in mind, it may be best to avoid trying to be too novel with your invites, or perhaps produce a more traditional invitation for those guests that might have more difficulty with something out of the ordinary.
Paper Record Player: (Score:5, Informative)
Paper Record Player: http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/04/15/133206/couple-sends-record-player-wedding-invitations [slashdot.org]
Very high failure risk (Score:5, Informative)
My cousin and her wife both work in tourism, so they fashioned their invites as plane tickets.
This confused a large number of people. My mom for example threw the invitation straight in the bin, thinking it was some mass mailing.
Be careful.
Re:circuit boards (Score:4, Informative)
They don't have to be typical green PCB color either, you can get the solder mask in a few colors. (green,white,red,black,blue)
Also you can get the exposed metal gold or silver plated (not expensive at all).
I quite like gold text on a blank mask, but for a wedding maybe silver on white.
As a rough idea, i recently got 300x PCBs made with gold plating and blank solder mask.
They were 55mm x 58mm and cost ~US$300 from pcbcart.
All you need to do is find someone who's experienced with PCB drawing software.
If you want to go all the way and have a microcontroller and led display, Jameco have 0.7inch 7x5 pixel dot matrix led displays for 75c each in qty of 100.
Paper record player (Score:3, Informative)
Mike Tarantino and Karen Sandler made and sent a paper record and player, with a song they'd recorded.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/04/15/133206/Couple-Sends-Record-Player-Wedding-Invitations [slashdot.org]
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
^ This (Score:4, Informative)
The printer was a local union shop right across the street and was able to do thermography (raised lettering basically). We also custom printed (work, color laser) all the envelopes.
We both work in IT, so when our guests asked where we got the invites and we told them how they came to be, they were sufficiently impressed.
They also didn't weird out grandma. Total cost was $260 including envelopes for ~130 of them, btw.