In Hong Kong, couples will think that traditional wedding cards are something old fashioned, in red color with golden hot stamping. Besides, all these traditional invitation cards are all provided by a few printing companies and all of them look alike. They would like to make their wedding as unique as possible and as a result they will have a perception that it will not be a good idea to choose wedding invitations with traditional designs.

Virtually, the alternative choice for the traditional invitation cards is invitations with what people in Hong Kong called western style (in fact I will define that as Hong Kong style). They are usually white in color, which is a great contrast to the traditional red color. However, white color in China usually means death. As a result, the parents of the couples may not like this kind of wedding invitations since these cards touch the taboos of Chinese people.

In fact, the choice of wedding invitation can result in disagreement between the couple and the parents. There was a couple who wanted to order the western style wedding invitation. And as a consequence they ordered them from a print shop and after they got everything printed, they found that their parents did not like the invitation designs very much.

The couple was really in a dilemma since they did not even think about the problem of white color wedding invitations. And finally they had to order everything again. This time what they order is the red color design in order to satisfy the requirements by their parents.

In fact couples are not reluctant to use the red color wedding invitation designs. They do not find the color an obstacle. The main problem is the design of these traditional cards. The cards are not properly designed. Indeed the companies which provide such wedding cards are print shops rather than designers. We have to admit that the interest of a designer and a print shop will be very different. The help of professional designers will be needed in order to make the traditional red color wedding cards more elegant.

As a graphic designer myself, I do not see anything wrong with the red color and golden hot stamping. They are only a choice of color and printing technique at the end of the day. In fact I am an advocate of traditional elements. However, we should manipulate the design elements wisely so that we do not copy what the print shop did in the past. For example, we can introduce Chinese paper cut patterns into the wedding invitations to make the invitation cards more elegant.

From my point of view, the print shops should work hand in hand with professional designers to redefine a new generation of Chinese wedding invitations. We should try to design the wedding invitations in a way that it is on one hand in line with the Chinese tradition and on the other hand has their own merits. Modern designs today can become traditional designs tomorrow. We need to constantly define and redefine our modern designs such that unique Chinese wedding invitations can be made.