Autumn wedding invitations: dried leaves and earth tones

It's half past nine on a Tuesday in late September and you're planning autumn wedding invitations. The laptop is open on a cover you almost like, the mug beside it has gone cold, and you keep swapping terracotta for ochre and back again. A friend said the light in October makes every photo look good, which is true, and now you have to get that light onto a screen.

Autumn brings its own colour. Your invitation doesn't need to compete with it. It needs three tones, one photograph and a ceremony time that still works when the sun drops behind the hedge. It's a web page, not a printed card: guests open it in a browser, on whatever phone is in their hand.

Autumn wedding invitations: start with the palette

Decide the colours before you decide anything else, including the typeface. Ink sits differently on ochre than it does on cream, and it's easier to pick a font once you know what's behind it. Three tones is the number. A cover in deep burgundy with the names in cream and the date in a muted gold holds together on its own. The same cover with bright gold and a metallic gradient goes muddy on a phone held at arm's length.

• Close the palette at three: terracotta, ochre, olive green. Add a fourth or fifth and the cover turns into a sample card, and the names stop standing out.
• One combination that works: deep burgundy background, names in cream, date in muted gold. Shiny gold and metallic gradients smear on a phone screen.
• Carry the same three tones through everything a guest reads more than once: the label at the top, the names, the date, the line underneath.
• Look at it on your own phone at dusk, not on the laptop at midday. That's the screen and the light your guests will open it in.

Dried leaves are a frame, not a backdrop

Use leaves as an edge or a corner of the cover: an oak branch down one side, a scatter of maple along the bottom. Put them behind the names instead and the letters disappear into the veins on a small screen. One cluster, one corner, space around it.

If you're uploading your own photos, pick one for the cover and make it a close-up. Maple leaves on the banquet table, a hand around a glass, the gate you'll walk through. The rest can decorate the inner scenes. Crop before you upload: centre the detail and leave air above and below. The invitation fits the photo into its frame, so the cropping you do yourself is the cropping that counts.

Three colours, one photo, one time. Everything else on the invitation is decoration.

The hour matters more in autumn than in June

In October the light goes earlier than you expect. A ceremony at 6:00 pm puts your drinks under lamps; move it to 5:00 pm and the golden hour lands on the toast. Write the time in full, "5:00 pm", not "late afternoon", because people read the invitation on the train and won't stop to work out what you meant. If you move the time two weeks before the wedding, edit the invitation: the link stays the same, guests see the new version, and nobody has to send a correction at eleven at night. Open a design, try the cover for free, and let the season handle the rest.