Ways to make place cards
A place card is a small folded card that stands at each seat with the guest's name on it. Folded into a little tent, it shows the name on both faces, so the guest and the person across the table can both read it. Finished, each one stands about 3.25 inches wide and a couple of inches tall.
Handwriting names on blank folded cards is the classic way, and if your writing is neat it beats anything a printer does. It's fine for a dinner for eight; across sixty guests it turns slow and uneven, and one slip wastes a card. Ordering printed or calligraphed cards looks polished but costs money and lead time, hard to justify for a backyard table. You can build them in Word, but the trick that makes a tent card work (printing the name upside down on the top half so it reads once folded) is tedious to set up by hand.
Our Place Card Maker does that rotation for you: paste the guest list and it lays out four folded cards per sheet with each name printed twice, so it reads right-side up on both faces after one fold. It's free and quick. What it isn't is a design studio: the layout is fixed, so for custom fonts, colors, or a monogram you'd want a real design tool.
Using the free Place Card Maker
In the box near the top labeled "One guest per line," put one name per line. To add a table number or a second line under a name, type a comma after the name and then the extra text, like "Priya, Table 4." Click "Generate … Place Cards (PDF)" and you get four cards to a sheet, each name printed twice so it survives the fold.
Printing, cutting, and folding
None of this is hard; it's just done in order, and cardstock is what makes the card stand instead of flop.
- Open the PDF and choose Print.
Double-click the downloaded file, then choose Print (in the File menu, or Ctrl+P on Windows, Cmd+P on a Mac). The window that opens is the print dialog. - Set the size to 100%.
Printers shrink pages a little by default, which throws off where the cards fall on the sheet and where the fold lands. Find the setting called Scale (or Size, or Page Scaling), set it to 100% or "Actual size," and turn off any "Fit to page" option. - Load cardstock and print.
Cardstock is thick, stiff paper; ordinary copy paper is too floppy to stand on its own. Load a few sheets and print, feeding one at a time if it jams. - Cut the sheet into four cards.
Cut along the outer edges. For lines to follow, turn on the "Show faint cut guides" checkbox before you download, and cut just inside them. - Score the fold, fold, and stand it up.
Run a butter knife or an empty pen along the center line under a ruler to press a shallow groove — that's scoring, and it makes the card fold on a clean straight line. Fold along it into a tent and set it at the place setting.
The size you're printing
Each flat card is 3.25″ × 4.25″, four to a US Letter sheet. Folded in half it stands about 3.25″ wide and 2.1″ tall, big enough to read across a round table without hiding the guest behind it.
Why one half looks upside down before you fold it
The finished card is a peak with a face pointing each way, so on the flat sheet one half is printed upside down. Fold the card in half and that half swings down to the back and lands right-side up. It looks wrong flat and correct folded, which is expected, not a mistake in the file. For which cardstock to buy, see the cardstock guide; for bigger buffet signs, see table tent sizes.