Digital invitation: 10 witches for a rooftop Halloween

It's 8:40 on a Friday in October. Someone is holding the rooftop door open with a pumpkin, the string lights are already up, and your phone keeps buzzing with the same three questions: what time, what do I wear, and can I bring someone. A digital invitation answers all of that in one link. You choose a design from the catalogue, drop in your own text and photos, and send it the same evening. What follows is ten witches for a teenage Halloween rooftop party, sorted by the hour the door creaks open.

Nothing here needs envelopes, printing or a group chat that swallows the details by Tuesday. Your guests open the link in the browser on their phone, no app to install, and reply from the same page. Build it tonight, send it tonight.

Digital invitation: pick your witch by the hour

Start with the clock. The light on a rooftop in October changes fast, and the design has to read at the time your guests actually arrive. Black on black with glitter is lovely at midnight and unreadable at eight, when there's still a bit of blue in the sky.

• Witch at the threshold: matte black, one candle, the time in large type, for a doors-open-at-eight party while the sky still has colour.
• Moon witch: night blue, thin type, a photo of your rooftop at dusk as the cover, for a nine o'clock start.
• Confetti witch: purple and orange, for the group that laughs at the hat instead of being scared of it.
• Last-dance witch: old gold on black, RSVP left open until the last song, for a ten o'clock invitation.

Write the dress code before you pick the font

The dress code causes more messages than the address does. Put it in a text field, in plain words: 'all black, hat yes, broom optional' does more work than three lines of explanation. If half the group wants the full costume and half doesn't, write both options and let people pick one when they reply.

You can change that line after the link is out. Move the start time by half an hour, swap the hat for a cape, fix the floor number: guests see the updated version and nobody re-sends a thing.

Pick the witch that matches your hour, write the dress code in plain words, send one link.

The best digital invitations for a teenage rooftop Halloween

The best digital invitations for a teenage rooftop Halloween are the ones you can finish in an afternoon: up to six of your own photos, one marked as the cover, music, and RSVP questions you write yourself. Confirmations land in a list inside the invitation, so you're not chasing replies at midnight while the candles burn down. Between the subway and the lift nobody wants to open a PDF on a bad signal, which is why the whole thing is a web page.