Digital Invitation Ideas: Porcelain Wedding Anniversary

The box is still in the wardrobe. Inside: the menu from the 2005 dinner, a dried rose, and the glass with the date written on the base in marker. You open it once a year and laugh at what the meal cost. That box is a better start than any speech. A digital invitation for a porcelain wedding anniversary can be built around those three objects today: pick a design from the catalogue, edit the cover, send one link.

Skip the long thank-you. Four paragraphs on a phone don't get read. Twenty years are easier to show in four or five scenes, each with one idea, one photo and a line of text that says something only the two of you could say.

A digital invitation for a porcelain wedding anniversary starts with what you kept

Go through the cupboard before you open the editor. The plates that only come out twice a year. The embroidered cloth from the wedding dinner. The glass with the date in marker. Each one holds a scene: a photo, a label, a sentence about why it's still here.

• Photograph the plate, the cloth and the toast glass in one sitting, in the same light. Mixed light is what makes a gallery look like a jumble of phone snaps.
• Give each object a short label — 'the glass we toasted with', 'the cloth from the wedding dinner' — and stop there. Two lines on one plate is one too many.
• Use the real name of the room: 'the garden table', 'the long room', 'the terrace'. Guests plan their evening around a place they can picture.
• Leave the guest list out of these scenes. Who's coming belongs in the RSVP, not in the story.

The best digital invitations for a porcelain anniversary, scene by scene

Order the evening as a chain, not a block. A cover with the twenty as the only large element. A scene for the old photographs. A scene for the dinner itself. A last one with the toast time and a map for anyone who has never found the restaurant.

On the cover, four fields and nothing else: the label ('XX anniversary'), your two names, the exact date and the place. The character counter is there so a long venue name doesn't push the date off a phone screen. If the room is called 'The Old Forge, garden room', write exactly that and leave the flourishes out.

Twenty years don't need a speech. They need five scenes, four fields on the cover and one honest photo of the two of you.

Colour first, then the type

Choose the palette before the font: off-white, the cobalt blue of old china, a muted sage. Then find a type that holds it. Gold works if it's matte and appears once, on the twenty or the date line; shiny gold across the whole design reads as a birthday card. Check it on a phone before you publish. A fine texture that looks warm on a laptop can go flat grey on a small screen, and if the colour doesn't survive the phone, change the colour.

The 2005 photo and this year's photo, in one scene

You can upload up to six of your own photos. The editor frames them for you and you mark which one sits on the cover. Put a vertical shot there and keep the horizontal ones for the inner scenes — the long table, the group, the view — so faces don't get cropped when the link opens. If a better photo turns up in a drawer next month, replace it after sending: the link is the same and nobody opens another envelope.

You have twenty years of material and room for five scenes. Start with the plate, the cloth and the glass, put your names and the date on the cover, and send the link to one person tonight to see how it reads on a phone. Then send it to everyone else with the RSVP open.