D's first birthday is in January (WHAT), and since we just spent a small fortune on Christmas cards, I don't really want to spend a ton more money on birthday party invitations, so I'd like to try to DIY something cute. What's the best program or website to use? I don't have photoshop or anything like that, and do not intend to invest in one of those programs. Looking for something free or something I already have (we have a PC, so Microsoft programs).
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GIMP is the free version of Photoshop!
You could also probably just use Powerpoint, depending on what you're trying to do. I've also had success using Inkscape, but it has a bit of a learning curve!
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it's not totally DIY but there are a lot of etsy sellers who have cute templates for low prices. they will often put in your details and send you a printable pdf for a pretty low price - I did this for LO's bday last year and paid $16 for invitation and cupcake toppers. I printed everything on card stock at my office.
as an example here is the shop I used:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/EllisonReed?section_id=10664610 -
@bhbee: I did the same thing! I bought a template for $12 and printed the invites for $6.
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@bhbee: Yeah, I did that for his birth announcements, but I have something pretty specific in mind for his party and haven't found anything on Etsy that matches my "vision." Ha ha, maybe I need to stop being so gosh darn anal.
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I have Paint.NET and Scribus (free versions of Photoshop and InDesign), but honestly for simple projects, Word works fine for me. The newer versions are much more similar to ID than they used to be. I used word starter to make this one. I started to do something more complex, but I decided that I wanted the picture to stand on its own.
For his bday party I did the etsy thing, but it was pretty much a blank canvas except a design at the bottom. I used downloaded a bunch of fonts I liked and used text boxes in word. Very low-fi!
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Oh I imported it into whiteboard on my idevice so that I could block out our name....that is not a part of the design, haha!
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@littlebug: if you find something *close*, you could message the vendor and see if they will do something custom for you! I did that and came up with a design very very close to my vision!
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@Mrs. Sketchbook: I have paint.net, too, and will give that a try. But I think probably PowerPoint or Word will do. I'll play around on that today. Thanks! BTW, that picture is awesome.
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I made ours on picmonkey.com - love their site! They have lots of fun fonts/icons you can use
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@Mrs. Sketchbook: love that photo so much!!
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@Mrs. Deer: aw, shucks, thanks!
@littlebug: thanks and good luck! Post pics!
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@Adira: so when you use PPT, how do you save the image as a jpg? Saving this idea for later!!
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@Mrs. Deer: Oh, I love picmonkey and use it all the time. I tried using it last night, but it isn't working for what I want to do.
ETA: Little Deer is so stinkin cute!
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@Mrs. Sketchbook: There are two ways! You can either save the entire slide as a .jpg (just do Save As... Other Formats and then select .jpg) or you can select the picture, right-click, and do "Save as Picture"
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@Adira: wow so simple! I wish I had used that.
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@Mrs. Sketchbook: I know! When I made our wedding albums, I did sooooooo much work doing them in Inkscape only to later discover I could've just done them in Power Point and it would've been sooooooo much easier!!!
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Ok, here's what I made with a combination of Power Point and picmonkey.com!
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@littlebug: oh that is adorable! I love it. My godson's 1st birthday party last year was superman themed and the party favors were superheroes. You did a great job!
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18 comments