Muslim wedding invitation videos — Nikah and Walima

The wording

The card opens with بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم (Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim). The ceremony is the نکاح (Nikah) and the reception hosted by the groom’s family is the ولیمہ (Walima) — they are distinct events and should not be merged onto one line.

Urdu is set in Nastaliq, which is a genuinely different typesetting problem from Naskh: the baseline slopes and the ligatures cascade. We set it properly and lay the page out right-to-left rather than mirroring a left-to-right layout, which is what produces the broken punctuation you see on template sites.

When to send it, and the sequence

The run is istikhara, mangni (engagement), manjha and mehndi, the Nikah, rukhsati, and the Walima — the last hosted by the groom’s family, often two or three days later.

Send the Nikah invitation five to six weeks ahead. The Walima card frequently goes out later and to a wider list; issuing it as a separate card in the same artwork keeps the two events distinct while looking like one wedding.

Motifs that carry meaning

Girih — strapwork tiling built from a small set of tiles. It propagates outward from a star, which makes it a natural build animation.

Mehrab — the arch. Used as the frame the invitation opens through.

Jaali — the pierced screen. Light through it does the work that a gradient would otherwise do badly.

Calligraphy — treated as the primary ornament, not layered over a photograph.

The Walima, invited on its own

The Nikah and the Walima serve different purposes and, in many families, different lists — the Nikah intimate, the Walima broad. An invitation that treats them as one event forces one list on both.

We set them as separate cards in one matching design: the Nikah card carries the ceremony and its time, the Walima card its own date, venue and hosts. Each forwards independently, so the right people receive the right invitation without anyone re-typing details into WhatsApp.