Invitations: Font Failure

Our invitations are in!!! And I'll do a little sneak peek soon ('cause I can't keep 'em secret for long!), but first I want to give a little insight into the design process, starting with the fonts.

I'm that girl who can look at a font on a sign and tell you what it is. But I took the lazy way out on our invitations. And I couldn't be happier!

Oh, imagine the horror: all the fonts in our invitation suite ... were already standard on my computer!

Let's put it this way: I could have spent hours upon hours browsing dafont.com or Fonts for Peas or 1000 Free Fonts. To be honest, that probably would have been fun, but I just didn't have the energy. I work in marketing, and most of the time, the standard fonts work fine for any project (Myriad Pro is EVERYWHERE, ya'll!). At my last job, my computer had 11,000 fonts on it, and I never had the time or energy to search through even HALF of those. Even with all those choices, we used the same five for almost every project. As much as I love fonts, I can't bring myself to go searching for them.

Regardless, I am very pleased with the way the invitations turned out. THRILLED, actually!

The fonts we used are:

If you're doing your own design work and don't have the time or patience to look online for fonts, there are a couple tricks you can do with your fonts in Photoshop to make them look cool.

First of all, play with variations on text. Just bolding, italicizing, condensing your font of choice can make it look totally different.

Second is the Swash tool, which I recently discovered! This works best with fonts that have "Pro" in the name.

In your character palette, click the drop-down menu on the far right (next to those double arrows that look like a fast-forward button).

Scroll down to OpenType, and select "Swash."

Now your text is fancy-fied!

This is just a subtle thing you can do to make your fonts look more unique. There are endless things you can do with fonts, even standard ones!

Are you designing your own invites? Do you have any cool text tricks?

(All fonts I've used are standard in Adobe Creative Suite 4, on a MacBook Pro running OSX Snow Leopard. I have no idea what fonts come standard on any other OS or version of Creative Suite.)