Festival Invitation Maker

I built this because the usual options for a quick festival invite are Canva templates that watermark the free tier, or a WhatsApp forward with someone else's name still on it that you're supposed to awkwardly edit in MS Paint. Neither is great when you just need "Ganesh Chaturthi at our place, Sunday, here's the address" turned into something that looks intentional in about two minutes. Ganesh Chaturthi is the only festival with full templates right now on purpose — I'd rather ship one that actually looks good than six that are all mediocre, and more get added as the design work for each one gets done properly.

How it works

The poster is built entirely on an HTML canvas, composited in a fixed layer order: background, then decorative elements, then the festival's subject artwork (the deity image, in this case), then a QR code if you added a location, then your uploaded photo, then all the text, then a logo if you have one. That order matters — it's why your uploaded photo always sits cleanly on top of the background art instead of getting buried under a decoration, and why text never renders underneath an image layer. The canvas itself is sized exactly to the output format you pick — 1080×1350 for a portrait post, 1080×1080 square, or 1080×1920 for a WhatsApp/Instagram Story — so there's no cropping surprise after the fact; what you see in the preview is the exact pixel dimensions you'll download.

The "Try Another Design" button doesn't touch anything you typed — it only reshuffles the visual layer: template, subject artwork, background, decorations, and color style. It keeps a running record of which combinations it's already shown you in the current session, so hitting it repeatedly cycles through genuinely different looks instead of showing you the same layout twice in a row. Your name, date, address, and message stay exactly as you entered them the whole time.

A real example

Say you're inviting extended family to a home visarjan gathering. Pick "Family Invitation," fill in the family name, date, time, and address, and if you add the address, the tool generates a small QR code on the poster that links straight to that location on Google Maps — so someone can tap it from their phone instead of typing the address into a maps app by hand. Choose Hindi if that's what your family reads first, pick Story format if this is going on WhatsApp Status rather than a feed post, and Royal Gold if you want something a bit more formal than the default Traditional style. Add a family photo, and it layers on top of everything else exactly where the template places it.

Common mistakes

• Uploading a very low-resolution photo. The canvas renders at 1080px on the short side minimum — a photo saved small from a WhatsApp download will look visibly soft once it's stretched to fill its slot. Use the original camera photo if you still have it, not a version that's already been compressed and re-shared a few times.
• Picking Square format for something meant for WhatsApp Status. Status and Stories are a tall 9:16 frame — a square image gets letterboxed with bars on WhatsApp's story viewer. Use Story format (1080×1920) specifically for anything going to Status or Instagram/Facebook Stories, and Square only for a normal feed post.
• Not checking the QR code before sending it out. It's generated from whatever you typed in the address field, so a vague or misspelled address produces a QR code that points to the wrong pin on the map. Tap-test it yourself on your phone before forwarding the poster to fifty people.