Did you know you can create invitations online for free using a website called Canva? You can make any kind of invitation or greeting card you want from very basic to super detailed. In this tutorial I’ll show you how. You will need to sign up for a free account at canva.com. There is also a paid version but you won’t need it. Everything I’m showing you today can be done for free so let’s get started.
(This post contains affiliate links. This just means if you purchase something by clicking one of my links I may receive a small commission at no fee to you.)
Step one: Sign up for a free Canva.com account
Canva is the most inclusive program to create invitations online for free. Once you have Canva pulled up click the “Create a Design” tab on the left side of your screen. You’ll see a lot of options pull up. Feel free to scroll through them just to see all the different awesome things you can do in Canva. You’ll notice they have an “Invitation” option but it’s more if a square and that wasn’t the look I was going for. Most invitations and greeting cards are 5X7 and that’s what I wanted for mine.
For this you’ll select “Custom Dimensions” and then change the “px” to “in” then type in a 5 in the first box and a 7 in the second box. This will give you a standard 5X7 size template to start creating your invitation.
Step two: Choose your background
So I’ve you’re looking to create invitations online for free you probably have a theme in mind. One of the most appealing looks for an invitation is to have the background set to that theme. For my example I went with a leopard print but the options are endless because you can use digital paper for your background. Head over to CreativeFabrica and search through their digital paper. I absolutely love Creative Fabrica and I pretty much mention them in every post because I simply couldn’t do half of the things I do without them. You can sign up for free or you can go big time and get a subscription plan. I have the all access plan which allows me unlimited downloads (fonts, SVG files, Digital paper, Clip Art, Mockups…) for free.
Once you have your digital paper picked out download it to your computer and then upload it into Canva. To do this, just click the “upload” icon in the left menu bar, select your paper and click okay. It will start to upload automatically. When it’s done, just click on it and it will transfer it over to your blank page. Drag the handles to make the paper big enough to cover your whole page.
Step three: Add the extras
Now that you’ve got your background it’s time to add the fun elements. There are so many to choose from but the main two sections you’ll want to look at are “shapes” and “gradients”. To get started click the “Elements” icon in the left menu bar. Next click on “Shapes” and scroll through to see the options. You can change the color of all the shapes offered so don’t worry about that. Choose something you think will be good for your invitation and click on it. It will show up on your page and you can edit it. Resize or rotate your shape however you’d like and then change the color.
To change the color simply click the grey box in the top menu section of Canva and choose whatever color you want. If they don’t have the exact color you want click something as similar as possible then click the “New Color” box at the top to tweak the color so it’s just right. The gradients work the same way just with two colors instead of one. Watch the video below to see how it all works.
Step four: Add the text
You’ll notice in my video I made my own PNG for the main part of my invitation simply because I already had a font in mind that I wanted to use. This tutorial will show you how to make your own PNG if you’d like however, you don’t need to. Canva has thousands of fonts to choose from so I’m fairly confident you’ll find something you love. Not all of the fonts are available for free but quite a few of them are.
To enter text into your design simply click on your design and then type a “t” on your computer keyboard. It will pull up a text box for you. You can then type in your text, choose your font, change the color and size and make it look however you’d like. You can also use the preformatted text options found in the text menu of Canva however there is not as much customization available there. It chooses the fonts and layouts for you and you just change the words.
And it’s that easy to create invitations online for free using Canva. Now that you know how, go get started making your own invitations.
