VERY IMPORTANT: If you want to address your envelopes vertically, despite our advisement not to, your envelopes MUST be at least 5.5 inches wide. No exceptions.

If you have not yet purchased your stationery, but are considering this tall envelope design, there are some problems you are going to run into that you need to be aware of before you place the order. If you have already purchased stationery with this type of envelope then the die is cast, but all is not lost.

Here are the problems:

1. If you address the envelope vertically, you will have to pay more for postage. The post office does not like non-standard size envelopes and they charge you a surcharge (currently 11 cents) for handling them. The same thing is true for all square envelopes, no matter the size. CAUTION: If you try to ignore the surcharge and just put a regular stamp on your envelopes you are running the risk of having every one of your envelopes returned to you or having your invitation show up postage due! Either would be disasterous!

The formula for determining if your envelope is a non-standard size follows:

2. The envelope may look large to the eye, but for addressing purposes it is not. I have made a graphic to illustrate this. The pink area illustrates the addressing area of the envelope. In the illustration the envelope size is 8 x 5.5 inches. Truthfully, it may as well be 3 x 5.5 inches, because the rest is just white space. This is equivalent to the size of a index card. Think of how small an envelope that size would be and consider the small point size that would have to be used to address it.

You must also consider this very important detail: We determine the font point size of the entire print job based upon the longest line of your guest list. So, if you have a couple of entries that are very long we have to adjust for that. The point size can become very small. We highly suggest cutting out fluff, like middle names, on your guest list to be able to get the largest point size possible. Also, definitely list the apartment number on it's own line where applicable.

Although they will be a small point size, you can get away with addressing these types of envelopes with clean non-loopy scripts or blocks. However, we will NOT address this type of envelope in a "hand calligraphy" such as SAF247 or SAF153. These typestyles look best, and appear more authentic, at larger point sizes. Very swashy scripts such as SAF 210A, SAF217 and SAF225 are also not allowed. The script becomes too hard to read at small point sizes. We are firm on our policy of not allowing some typestyles on certain size envelopes. It does not produce a good-looking finished product and does not meet our high quality guidelines.

One final point, and this is just strictly our opinion, these envelopes look funny addressed vertically.

Our solution to these problems is simple, address the envelope horizontally.