Journal
How to print Canva wedding templates
You can edit Canva wedding templates with a free account. You do not need Canva Pro to export the invitation, and you should not need to buy a font. If a file tells you to purchase a typeface before you can print your own names, it is the wrong file. Ivory & After uses free fonts only. That is a promise, not a sample locked until you pay someone else.
Set aside about two minutes to open the links. The download from Etsy includes an instructions PDF. It walks through edit, export, and print. Read it once before you start changing colors. The template is already a suite. You are putting names into it, not redesigning it from a blank page. The colorways in the file are the ones that were drawn to match. Inventing a fourth palette is how a suite stops being one.
What you can change: the names, the date, the place, a color from the colorways in the file, and a photo where the template has a frame. What you should change carefully: the size of the type. If you make the names much larger, you will hit the edge. The edge matters, because the printer trims. Leave the hierarchy the template already has. Your names are the point. They do not need to fill the card to be read.
Export two files. The PDF is the print file. Use it when a copy shop or an online printer asks for print-ready art. The JPEG is the same design as an image. Use it for a digital save the date template, a proof on your phone, or a shop that asks for JPEG. Both are in the download. You do not pick one and lose the other. A screenshot of the Canva window is neither. It will be blurry, and it will include interface you do not want on a card.
Bleed is the ink that runs past the cut. It exists so a thin white line does not appear when the blade is a millimeter off. Leave it in the PDF. Do not crop it off to make the preview look tighter. If your shop asks for a specific size, the instructions PDF names the size of that piece. An invitation, a place card, and a welcome sign are not the same size. Do not print them all on one sheet and cut by eye unless you are comfortable with that and you have measured twice.
Ask for a proof on the paper you will actually use. Screens are brighter than card stock. Champagne ink on ivory can look pale on a monitor and right on paper, or the reverse. One proof is cheaper than fifty menus. Order it before you approve the guest list’s worth of paper. If the shop shows you a laser print on thin office paper, that is a check of the type, not a check of the color.
Card stock for invitations, reply cards, details, menus, place cards, and thank-yous. Something around a sturdy cover weight is the usual ask; the shop can show you a sample. A heavier sheet or a mounted board for the welcome sign. Fold place cards only if the template is built to fold. The file will say. Editable place cards that are meant to lie flat should stay flat. A fold you invent at the printer will crack the type.
We do not print, and we do not run a printing service. Home is fine for a small run if your printer handles card stock and you can trim straight. A copy shop is fine. An online printer is fine. The kit does not include font files or Photoshop files. You do not need either. The Canva link and the exports are the product.
When the print looks like the screen, you are done. When it does not, check three things. You exported PDF rather than a screenshot. You did not stretch the file to fit the paper. The shop did not substitute a font. Free fonts travel inside a proper PDF export from the template. If a shop replaces the type, ask them to print the PDF as it was sent. The print-ready files live with the suite. The Afterglow suite is the warmer evening set if you want to see how a full kit exports: invitation through welcome sign, PDF and JPEG, in colorways that were drawn together.