The Civil Ceremony Booklet

The booklet for civil ceremony or wedding program?

The main difference between a booklet for the civil ceremony and the wedding program is in the content. The wedding program includes logistical information, as schedules, programs of the entire day and helps your guests to understand how your wedding will be structured from beginning to end. It is very useful for weddings in Italy, so that the newlyweds can inform the invites of all the details and transfers. Do you need a wedding program? We talk about it in detail here.

Why realize a booklet for a civil ceremony?

Wherever you get married, at the town hall, in a villa, in a palace or on the beach, you have surely thought to some kind of seats for your guests: chairs, benches or other seats coherent with your style. Whatever they are, you could leave on each seat, the booklet with the most important passages of the ceremony: promises, the function and some readings or songs you have chosen. All your guests could follow the ceremony without losing fundamental details and bringing home a wonderful souvenir! Sometimes the acoustics is not good, in particular, when rooms are big and with high ceilings, or you are in an open space. Moreover, when guests are a lot, it is difficult to see the highest point. With the booklet, everybody could follow your passages and get emotional with you.

Let’s see how you could realize the booklet for the ceremony!

How to design the civil ceremony booklet

As with the booklet for the religious wedding, there are many solutions also for the civil ceremony: a more complete option, with all the steps of the ceremony, and a shorter and reduced one. What are the parts of a civil ceremony?

Parts of a civil ceremony

During a civil ceremony, there are basically three steps: the reading of articles from the Civil Code (about reciprocal rights and duties of the newlyweds, their residence, duties towards children, etc.), the rituals and the giving and receiving of the rings. Then, the newlyweds can add some personal promises or something significant, as a reading or a song. If your promises will be spontaneous, you could insert in the booklet some phrases or information of what will happen, as “the promises of Anna and Marco”.

The structure of the booklet

We said that the booklet contains some information about the ceremony, and now we are going to explain how to organize it.

The cover
In the cover, you have to write your names, wedding date and place, if you want. Something simple but that could communicates the mood of your wedding.
You could add an image, a drawing, a photo and leaving all the rest for the inside.

The inside
In relation to what you have chosen, remember that all texts have to be inserted in a tidy layout, following the sequence of the ritual. Choose a readable font and leave some white spaces to let the text breathing.
Consider that the civil ceremony is shorter than the religious one, so two internal pages should be sufficient. Instead, if you want to insert all the parts, choose the format with 6 internal pages and the further two for the cover and the back cover. If you have free spaces, you can arrange the text and leaving the page behind the cover and the one before the back cover white.

The back cover
You can decide to leave an empty space on the back cover or adding a text or a citation with which you thank your guests.

Choosing fonts

The realization of booklets has to respect the theme and style you have chosen for your wedding, as with invitations and announcements, the guest book, seating chart, place cards and escort cards.
Start from the graphic of your wedding invitation and use the same fonts. The choice of the font (or fonts) follows the style of the wedding suite, if you have it.
You can use the same font of the invitations for titles and finding another one for long texts, that will be read by your guests. Choose readable and clear font, as Times, Garamond, Helvetica, Futura or a Gill Sans.
Have a special consideration for colours. For what texts is concerned, you have to choose a colour that creates the right contrast to allow the reading: black, grey, sepia, for example. If you have a prevalent colour as common thread of your wedding, use it for big headings or for the ribbon that will bind the sheets.

Choosing size and paper

Usually, newlyweds choose the A4 size, folded in two parts as a book. In this way, it changes and becomes an A5 size, of cm 14,8 x 21. It is a comfortable size, because it is standard and easy to print.

Also the choice of paper is important because, together with the other elements of the wedding stationery, it tells your story. You can opt for the simple ordinary paper, but with a greater weight: 100 grams instead of the classic 80. It is thicker, heftier and well-formed. You can also choose a different colour, if you want to avoid the classic white: some options are beige, ivory, dove-grey, cream or the colour of your theme, if it is a pastel one and eases the reading. Dark colours on dark bottoms do not ease the reading. A bright and solid colour is better for the ribbon that binds the sheets.
For the cover and the back cover, that would be the same sheet, you could opt for a thick card of the same colour of inner pages.

All the elements of the wedding stationery (invitations, place card, cards) offers endless possibilities.
In our experience, we have always seen different things, even if many themes and style were similar. Everything depends on the amount of personality you are going to put in each detail of your wedding.