Digital invitation for a garden wedding: the plan rules

You're at the gate with a pencil and a sheet of paper, trying to work out where the long table goes. The marquee on the left, dinner under the walnut tree, the speaker near the bench where your grandmother will sit. None of that fits on a card. A digital invitation for a garden wedding can hold all of it — the route, the shade at 6pm, the rain version — and you can build and send one today from the catalogue.

Get the order right and the rest is quick: route first, words second, typeface last. Here's how to lay it out so nobody ends up standing by the door with a glass, wondering where to sit.

The garden plan decides the invitation

Take one sheet and draw the garden as a guest walks it: gate, ceremony spot, drinks, long table, dance floor, speaker. Ten minutes with a pencil is worth more than a week of wording. If the entrance and the dance floor share the same corner, you have a problem no font will solve.

• Draw the route on one sheet: gate, where the grandparents sit, where the long table goes, where the speaker stands.
• Mark the three things a guest looks for without asking: where to park, where the loo is, where to sit. If those don't fit on the invitation, the garden isn't explained well enough.
• Walk the plan at 6pm, the aperitif hour. The shade from the wall or the big tree falls across the drinks area, not where you drew the table at noon.
• Pencil in the wet-weather version: dinner under the porch, ceremony an hour earlier. Write it down while you're still deciding, not on the morning itself.

How to create a digital invitation for a garden wedding, scene by scene

An invitation like this works in chained scenes, so the day reads in order: the gate, the patio, the promises, the long table, the last dance. Guests open it from a link, a QR code or a WhatsApp message, in the phone's browser, with no app to install — which matters when your uncle is parked at the gate trying to work out where to go.

Each scene gives you one field per piece of information: label, names, date, one line, place. A character counter stops you spilling out of the frame, and the preview updates as you type, without reloading. Up to six of your own photos drop into the frame and crop themselves; the patio at 8pm can be the cover, and you can swap it later. Music and the RSVP questions sit on the same page, so the guest who confirms while listening to your entrance song doesn't then message you to ask the time.

Draw the route before you choose a typeface. Nobody remembers the font; they remember where they left the car.

Change the rain plan without resending the link

On the day, plan B gets decided in ten minutes: dinner under the porch, ceremony an hour earlier. Edit the scene and the link stays the same — no reprints, no second round of envelopes. Change the hour, the map, the dress code or a sentence, and whoever opens it sees the current version. Confirmations land in one ordered list inside the invitation, with the questions you set. Put the QR where people actually look — the fridge, the car, the family group chat — and print two copies for the aunt who'll want to keep one. Digital invitations don't print or post anything, so that split is the honest one. Filter the collection by style, build the cover from your patio photo, publish with one button and send the link before you go to bed.