Digital invitation for a Halloween dinner in Paris

The table is booked for eight at a small place off Rue Oberkampf. It's the 31st, the restaurant wants one surname for the booking, and your group chat has produced three voice notes and no clear answer. This is the point where a link beats a thread: you can send a digital invitation for a Halloween dinner in Paris tonight, straight from the catalogue, and get everyone to the same door at the same time.

The invitation is a web page for your evening, not a PDF that disappears into a camera roll. Guests open the link in the browser on their phone, read it on the metro, and reply. Nothing to install, no account to create, and one ordered list of answers instead of forty messages you have to count by hand.

A digital invitation for a Halloween dinner in Paris has to read at the door

You'll open it on a doorstep at half eight, coat over one arm, phone at low brightness. Black or bottle-green background, thin type, one carved pumpkin. That's the whole design brief. Keep orange for a single detail — the date, or the word Halloween — otherwise the address and the booking name drown in decorations.

• Black or bottle-green background, thin type, one carved pumpkin: readable at a door, in the dark, in a hurry.
• Keep orange for one thing only — the date, or the word Halloween. Not the whole card.
• Try the design in preview mode before you pay, then look at it on your own phone, outside, at night.
• Put one of your own photos on the cover — a table with candles and two carved pumpkins is enough. You can add up to six photos and swap any of them later.

How to create a digital invitation with the address and the booking name

Two fields decide whether people find you. Use the notes box for the full restaurant address: street, number, the Paris postcode, and the nearest metro station with its line number. Then write 'Réservation au nom de…' with the surname your guest will actually give at the door. Not 'I booked it' — nobody remembers that at 20:30 with a coat in their arms.

Set the hour in the date field as 20:30, not 'around nine'. The confirmation list then shows you who's warning they'll be late. And if half the table is French and half is Spanish, set the invitation content per language. One link, two languages, no second message to the group.

The invitation isn't the decoration. It's the thing that gets eight people to the right door at the right time.

Digital invitations take a change without a resend

If the restaurant cancels at six, you edit the place, the map and the time after you've already sent the link. It stays the same link. Nobody gets a new message, nobody turns up at the old address. You can also rewrite the cover line — 'the creaking door is in the second courtyard' works better than 'follow the noise' — and guests see the updated version when they open it again. Confirmations arrive inside the invitation, in one list, in the order they come in, so there's nothing to dig out of the chat. So: pick a design, write the address and the name on the booking, and publish before the door creaks at eleven.