Spring Christening Invitations: Colour First, Flowers Second

You start looking at spring christening invitations in February, back when the almond trees are the only thing in flower. By March you are at the kitchen table with forty photos of your baby in a white blanket, and somewhere around the fourth template you notice the watercolour wreath has eaten the date.

The invitation has one job: tell people who, when, where and what to wear, without making anyone squint at a phone. The rest — borders, script fonts, little vines — is decoration. Useful decoration, but decoration.

Spring christening invitations: colour first, flowers second

Choose three colours before you choose a single flower. Sage green, off-white and a dusty rose will carry the whole invitation. If the cover mixes lilac, coral and lemon yellow, your baby's name stops being the first thing the eye lands on.

• Three tones, not five: sage green, off-white and dusty rose. A fourth colour only earns its place if the name still reads at arm's length.
• Pastels want light backgrounds and dark text. Charcoal grey on off-white reads on the first try; lemon yellow on white makes people bring the phone closer.
• Pick the palette after you know what the family is wearing that day. If the baby is in off-white, a sage green cover is already telling the same story.
• Open the cover on your own phone, at arm's length, before you send anything. If you cannot find the date, neither can your grandmother.

What the invitation has to say, without decoration

Five things get read in the first seconds: heading, names, date, one short phrase and the place. If the date is hiding inside a poem, it is gone.

Write the time and the dress code before you publish. If either changes, you edit it and the link stays the same: guests open the invitation and read the new version. Nobody reprints anything, nobody sends a second envelope. Leave out what the invitation cannot solve — the confirmation form collects who is coming and how many, not allergies or menu choices. If the caterer needs those, message the parents directly.

A spring invitation has to hold its own next to a garden in bloom: three colours, one flower, and the date where anyone can find it.

One flower on the cover is worth twenty

Put a real photo on the cover — your baby, the two of you, the almond branch from the garden — and save the floral motifs for the decorative scenes. Your own pictures frame themselves. You can upload up to six photos: one cover and five decorative ones, and you can mark a different one as the cover later without touching the text or the date. A close-up of flowers at the top with the name underneath works better than a floral pattern behind the letters: the pattern competes with the text, the close-up does not.

When spring changes the plan, the link changes with it

A countdown settles the classic mix-up between Saturday the 12th and Sunday the 13th, the one that happens when the date was given out loud at a family lunch. If the ceremony moves half an hour earlier because rain is coming, you edit the time and whoever opens the link reads the updated version. Fill in the place properly too: in spring plenty of guests travel from another city and open the map on their phone before leaving the house.

Before you argue about fonts, close the palette and the date. The rest sorts itself out. Try a cover for free, personalise it in your browser and publish when it is ready for 29.99 EUR, one payment.