2. Consider the wedding date. This is more of an overall rule. Holiday weddings can be tricky. If your guests are parents that have full-time jobs and you book a 4th of July wedding, you dont want them to feel imposed upon, as they might not want to miss their only time with family to come to your event. Instead, consider a date that your guests can anticipate with ease. They’ll appreciate it when they open that save-the-date!

3. Consider the send-out date. The date you send out communications depends on when the wedding is or where your guests are coming from. If it’s a destination wedding, say, in the Caribbean during Christmas time, I would send out a save-the-date six to seven months in advance. If most of your guests are local, a good rule of thumb is to send materials out at least eight weeks in advance.

4. Save time. Although some couples prefer traditional distribution, I recommend sending out the save-the-date electronically and leaving the official invitations as hardcopy keepsakes. My new collection with Postmark launches in August, and we’re doing some amazing electronic pieces. It will be just like my custom stuff, but digitally delivered.

5. Create a theme. At Marc Friedland, Inc. we encourage our clients to consider an over-arching theme or “event brand” so that all details tie into one integrated experience with a unique visual and stylistic voice. This can be expressed through color, style and text. For example, when we created music producer Timbaland’s wedding invitations, he decided on a “Heaven on Earth” theme, as the wedding was located in Aruba. This theme helped dictate the color and aesthetic for all the various elements that went into both the communications and event as a whole.

6. Work together. Whenever possible, I try to meet with both the bride and groom in an effort to capture both of their senses of style in the materials. It’s interesting to see how couples collaborate (or don’t collaborate) on this piece of the process and it’s also very telling in terms of how they may navigate their lives together. Create something that both of you feel comfortable with. After all, invitations should be inviting. It should promise that the experience will be worth partaking in.

7. Make it special. How people communicate and the level of detail my company tries to bring to the table is just as important as the gown, food and music. My experience is that long after the wedding, people may forget what they ate or wore, but having this keepsake—whether its the invitation itself or menu with the bride and groom’s name on it—is a true treasure of that experience. Seeing it brings back all the memories. Some of our clients end up framing their invitations. A few of our more elaborate pieces have even landed on eBay as collector’s items!

8. Avoid gimmicks. For instance, if your wedding is on the beach, don’t put sand in your invitation! Imagine the clean up involved when someone opens that letter. However, every romance is an individual adventure, so don’t feel like your invitation has to be devoid of individuality or has to be extremely formal because thats how everyone else’s is. Keep it stylish, smart and personal.

9. Practice etiquette. Include wording in your invitation that is going to make people feel the most welcomed. Take the high road in terms of grace, inclusion and warmth. If you use that as a guide instead of overwhelming yourself with politics, you’ll have a good radar system. For example, if someone has divorced parents, rather than call out specific parent names in the invitation, simply word it as “Together with our families, we invite you.” It’s also fun to include a quote that captures the essence of your romance—or the destination. If you’re planning a destination wedding in Venice, maybe there is a really great excerpt from an Italian opera that you could include to cleverly set the tone.

10. Spell it out. Finally, in terms of attire, dont make the invitation wording terriby confusing. If you like black tie, call it black tie—don’t say “semi-formal from the waist up.” Keeping it vague or ambiguous creates unnecessary anxiety. A well-informed guest is a happy guest!
· Marc Friedland [Official Site]
· Marc Friedland on Sprucing Up the Official Oscar Envelope [Racked]
· Vera Wang Gowns and Lisa Vanderpump Advice at Unveiled [Racked]

Between their surprise nuptials, show tune singalongs, Princess Bride readings, and computer-coded wedding programs, Facebook geeks are remaking the rites of marriage just as they remade how people socialize.

And while you might argue that the social network created by the Facebook crew has become a mixed blessing with each privacy tweak, it’s hard to dispute that the company’s big shots are improving the state-of-the-art in weddings.

Weighed down by baroque traditions and ever-increasing price tags, the wedding is a classic candidate for the byword of Silicon Valley: disruption. The ceremonies of Facebook’s young Turks tend toward irreverence rather than pomp,  wit rather than sentiment, and the heartfelt over the holy — at least judging from the last few. Those trends will sound familiar to other young wedding-goers – Facebookers just seem to take them much further.

The geekiest Facebook wedding to date was last week’s union of early Facebook employee Andrew McCollum, now with Fresh Pond Partners, and Gretchen Sisson, a sociology postdoc. Their guests included three other early Facebook employees, Adam D’Angelo, Chris Hughes, and Kevin Colleran. The wedding’s program contained a series of web geek in-jokes, including a listing of family and wedding party members in CoffeeScript, a trendy dialect of the browser scripting language JavaScript. It also outlined the proceedings in XML, a web-centric data markup format, and included a marriage-themed crossword from Kevin Der, who created a Steve Jobs tribute crossword puzzle for The New York Times shortly after the Apple co-founder’s death.

“Easily [the] best wedding ceremony ever,” wrote former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee, who, naturally, chronicled the nuptials on her Twitter feed, midway through the event.

In case the program wasn’t off-the-wall enough, the wedding’s recessional was Indiana Jones’ theme song, while the ceremony opened with a quote from the Princess Bride, delivered as a surprise by an uncle of Ms. Sisson’s, who was serving as officiant:

Mawage. Mawage is wot bwings us togeder tooday. Mawage — that bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam… And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva… So tweasure your wuv.

The ceremony also included a reading from Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the landmark same-sex marriage decision handed down in Massachusetts. “So much better than Corinthians,” Lee tweeted. At the reception, there were grilled cheese sandwiches from a food truck.

Betabeat tracked down the couple’s registry, which requested guests donate to nonprofits: “Your options are abortion, gay marriage, and teen parents. If you’re a Republican, we have a registry on Amazon.com.”

Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was slated to be one of McCollum’s groomsmen, but ended up missing the knot-tying due to the timing of his own unusual wedding, a stealth backyard event disguised as a medical school graduation party for bride Priscilla Chan. In some ways, Zuckerberg hewed close to tradition at the May event. He even traded his famous hoodie-and-jeans outfit for a suit.

The guests noshed on an unconventionally casual selection of Mexican food and sushi from local restaurants. Zuckerberg and Chan also broke from tradition in dispensing with an officiant and by writing their own vows.

In contrast to Zuckerberg’s surprise ceremony, Aaron Sittig’s October wedding to fellow Facebook executive Jessica Bigarel involved some pre-partying: Guests, including best man Zuckerberg, reportedly sang Broadway show tunes together the night before the event. Flamboyant Linda Gerard, a hostess at the Palm Springs hotel, led the singing. The wedding day also had exuberant flourishes, including a marching band and, at the reception, streamers and balloons. (There seems to have been a Glee theme, maybe?)

While the Facebook wedding were very different in their particulars, the Facebook nuptials all share a certain cheeky tone and willingness to break with longstanding traditions: Whether it’s keeping politics out of the ceremony, hewing to the established format (which hardly includes marching bands), or providing lots of advance notice.

Still, as with everything Facebook does — even weddings — there will be competition from younger upstarts. Just imagine the parties when those Dropbox cowboys get hitched.