Publisher is my friend

Microsoft Publisher is my new friend! I designed our wedding menus using publisher and, with a little help from Mr. Onion for the text box layout, I just finished the design of our wedding program (and the crowd goes wild)! Ok, so I'm a little more excited about having one more thing checked off than you are, but thought I'd share my joy with you anyway.

I only did a test print which is not on our lovely card stock yet because I need to wait to hear back from our minister to finalize the order/details of the ceremony and we haven't picked a recessional song yet -- also waiting to hear back from our guitarist, Brenden Burns on that. Here are some pictures of the test print (I've blurred out personal information for every one's privacy):







Click any of the images to see them larger. It is offset so when you fold it over the left is shorter than the right and our brocade patter that appeared on the save-the-dates, invitations, thank you notes, table numbers and OOT welcome booklet will be peaking out. I couldn't make it print flush so we'll just have to trim the excess white off to get the look I want, but still so much better than paying someone else to design this last minute project.

On the back are the lyrics to the two songs that will be musical interludes during our ceremony so people can feel more involved. The Jack Johnson song will be played on solo guitar and not sung so I wanted people to understand why we picked it, and the other song will be sung and I wanted people to really understand how perfect the lyrics are!

I got the idea of the shorter fold from a recent issue of Brides Magazine that had some creative program ideas. I'll be sure to post pictures when the actual programs are printed.

In the mean time -- any thoughts while it's still in the "design" stage? I used the same colors and fonts as I used on the menu -- I'm all about consistency. Oh, and I got another use out of one of our great monograms that I choose from Creative Montage on the cover. Hooray for 5 monograms for $15 -- totally worth it! Thanks in advance for your feedback.

DIY Wedding Menu

I purchased 100 extra blank sheets of our invitation card stock from Creative Montage for my DIY printing projects. I got started on our first project last night -- our wedding menus.

I have never used Microsoft Publisher before. My fiance and I worked together (which usually on a computer is a challenge as we think differently in our order of operations) and I think they came out really well.

Here is a print screen of the publisher file:



Here is a picture of a test print (changed a little of the wording/spacing etc.):



Close-up



Publisher How To:

I would say publisher was fairly simple and intuitive if you are familiar with the Microsoft Suite. Here are some basic instructions if you want to do this yourself.

1) I typed and formatted the menu text in Microsoft Word

2) Created a text box in publisher and sized it to fit two side by side with equal space on all sides.

3) Inserted an image (our monogram from Creative Montage. They are only 5 for $15 so check it out!) by clicking "Insert" and then "picture" and placed it at the top of the text box.

4) Pasted the text from the word document and it fit pretty perfectly! Just lucky I guess.

5) I did a quick select all and centered the text.

6) Then I added a border by clicking on line/boarder style on the tool bar (3/4
inch).

7) I then selected all the text + the boarder and changed the color to match our monogram exactly. Note: I used Adobe photoshop to get an exact color match, but you could eyeball it I guess.

8) Then I did a "select all" and copied then pasted and dragged the exact match over to the right hand side of the page.

Publisher is great for things like this because it does this thing that I started calling "click and lock" although I have no idea if it has a real name. If you click and drag a text box it will "click and lock" to the margins you established (ours are .25 all the way around) so it fits perfectly and you're not worried if it will line up.

I look forward to making our wedding programs with Publisher too next month. I wish I'd discovered this program before I designed our "out of town" guest booklets in Word, but live and learn! We'll have to buy a few packages of ink for our printer before we're ready to print all of these, but well worth it I think.