Birthday parties, weddings, fundraising dinners, and galas are all events that require plans, budgets, and head counts. Enter the world renowned four letter abbreviation RSVP. RSVP is a common abbreviation we see on all these invitations, but how many of us actually know what it means? This expression comes to us from France and stands for "répondez s'il vous plaît," or "please respond" in English. RSVPs  are a very important part of the party planning process. They allow the host or hostess an accurate count for how much food and how many seats and party favors will be necessary.

In today’s tutorial, we will show you how to make the perfect response card, flawlessly complementing your custom made invitation. Let’s take a look at Jocelyn’s 18th birthday party invitation below.

RSVP Cards for a Birthday Party

This is a sophisticated invitation for a young lady's formal introduction into adult society. For this invitation, we have used the Masquerade Party theme, which sets the perfect tone for an elegant evening celebration.

Once you have perfected your invitation, make a copy of the invitation into a smaller size. The original invitation is a 5x7" portrait flat card. For the response card, we have copied Jocelyn’s invitation to the 4x6" landscape size. While the formatting of the copied card looks a little funny, we have everything we need to turn this card into a beautiful matching RSVP card.

Begin by opening up the copy of your invitation in the editor and start rearranging the various elements and editing the text. By shifting some elements to the left, adding a photo of the birthday girl, and a little help on RSVP wording, a perfect pair to the invitation is created.

The last step is to change your project title so that it better describes the project (we changed it to Masquerade Party RSVP). This will make ordering your cards much easier when the time comes. We hope this helps you create beautifully matching RSVP cards for your invites!

Which celebration are you currently planning?