Weddings are expensive and highly personal events, with the engaged couple often shelling out big bucks to make their fairy tale come true. One of the very first significant costs you'll put your stamp of approval on are wedding invitations and save-the-dates.
Sure, you could find some basic e-vites or printable templates with watercolor flowers or a generic theme to announce your nuptials, but what if one of you is, for example, a huge nerd? (It's me. I'm the nerd.)
What if you're throwing a Star Trek-themed wedding or having an engagement party that features cyberpunk details or hosting a joint stag event styled after the aesthetic of Baldur's Gate 3? Custom invites can get pricey, so here's how to use the artificial intelligence text-to-image tool Midjourney to make your wedding invites not only stand out and come in at a minimal cost, but also perfectly represent who you are.
The Midjourney begins
Tackling something as important as wedding invites calls for a specialized tool that produces images of a high-enough quality that they can be used as either digital or printed materials. I'm using Midjourney, which has been tapped to create visuals for everything from graphic novels to images with fewer high-minded merits.
Midjourney uses text prompts to generate images based on its training data like most AI tools made to fast-track art creation. It was launched in beta in 2022 and runs through Discord via web browser with the attractive price tag of free for limited queries, and a range of $10 to $120 per month for more prompts and faster results.
Since it was in beta, Midjourney has added some of the most robust and customizable options of any text-to-image AI tool around, including blending two images to make a new one and setting parameters around unique functions, like what Midjourney developers call chaos, or distinct difference, in images generated from a single prompt.
I'm betting the flexibility and specificity available through Midjourney will produce results that make your nerd wedding event invites sparkle brighter than the Crystalline entity.
No chit-chat, just results
Midjourney doesn't have a personality, unlike chatbots ChatGPT and Copilot. It's not built for back-and-forth collaboration and can't elaborate on an image by referencing a previously generated piece of art in conversational notes, but what it lacks in chit-chat, it more than makes up for in versatility.
Here's how to get the best results out of Midjourney's text-to-image prompt.
1. Be specific about the end use of the images. Let Midjourney know these images will be used as printable invites to avoid results like the below (invites that would make any vampire bride blush with delight but don't work as actual stationary).
Adding the phrase "printable invite" to the prompt yields more practical results, but they were a little busy, which brings us to the next bit of advice.
2. Break down what you do and don't want. Midjourney allows you to direct the tool to exclude certain elements in the images through a specific "no" command on the end of the prompt. For example, the invites should be fantasy inspired, but I don't want them to contain mythical creatures, and the results it was returning were heavy on scales and claws. This fictional wedding is a classy event, for gods' sake, not a Renfaire tailgate.
3. Refine the style of the imagery and add some feeling to the prompt. The results were coming off less romantic and more "Fus Ro Dah," so I added "whimsical" and "delicate" to the prompt, resulting in the below. It's still not reading as a Baldur's Gate theme, but Midjourney allows for something called "vary region" editing where you can select specific elements to change.
I enhanced the scene with some Baldur's Gate easter eggs using the "vary region" command. This part took much longer than I'd anticipated -- and by much longer I mean about 15 minutes of regenerating results -- but the end result was worth it.
Midjourney also adds English text to images with its text generation command, and provides for easily creating higher-resolution (2,048x2,048 pixels) images.
Now all that's left to do is pop this into a Word doc, Google Doc or tool like Canva to add text and send this out into the world for your loved ones to RSVP way too close to the date of the event. (If you can clock what the added elements are referencing, you might just get an invite to the reception. Sorry, no imps allowed.)
And not only is your wedding stationery designed for your exact interests, but also that significant cost of getting a designer to work on your invitations is gone -- especially if you're using the free version of Midjourney. Even if you pay for the $10 a month version of the tool, this part of your wedding will cost you hundreds of dollars less.
Saving money with AI? Now there's a use case.
For more visual uses of artificial intelligence, check out CNET's guides on how to use AI to redesign your living room, how to create custom thank-you notes with Midjourney and how to use AI to plan your Halloween decor.