It can be tempting to dive into the design facets of your wedding immediately after getting engaged, after all you’ve dreamed of getting married. 

And truthfully we want you to explore your design preferences as one of the foundational steps of our six phased event planning approach. 

But then we would encourage you to take a step back and finalize a handful of the logistical elements before moving into phase three – design – with a firm foundation upon which to make all your event design decisions

Moving forward with event planning with an incomplete vision results in confusion.  

Picture this – you are at the point in your wedding planning where you are starting to book your vendors and some of them will ask you what your vision is. 

But it’s early in the process. 

I mean maybe you’re even recently engaged. You start to answer by describing pictures you’ve pinned on Pinterest and some thoughts you’ve had but then you think to yourself what does vision even mean? 

This is where the design of an event gets lost. And before it even had a chance to come to life.

Without first laying a foundation to support exactly what they want and exactly what their event needs, many couples end up being persuaded into things that most likely don’t align with what you would have asked for if they had had the opportunity to first explore your event design preferences. 

The Value of Event Design 

You see your wedding vision is a central facet to your wedding and knowing how to nail down on exactly what your vision entails and how to effectively communicate it with your vendors is essential to ensuring: 

1. Your wedding design is one you will love for years and years to come
2. And that the result – that is your wedding day experience – is exactly what you dreamed it would be. 

So how do you do this in such a way that creates a cohesive experience aligned event?  

With a design blueprint – that is a step by step approach to event design – your design planning has a guide that helps you:

1. effectively hone in on a vision
2. realistically create the vision
3. efficiently communicate the vision
4. confidently produce the vision 

Let’s go ahead and explore the value of event design by highlighting how this step by step approach can ensure your wedding design is:

• Cohesive {from the save the date to the celebratory farewell}
• Comprehensive {takes care of those big and small details} 
• Functional {allows your event to naturally flow from event element to event element} 
• Impactful {ensures that each decision has a role in all the design pillars} 
• Infused with your story and moments of delight that build an experience and not just an event 

Hone In On A Vision 

First when should you start this work? We typically recommend this preference work to begin during the foundation stage – phase one of our six phase approach to event planning. 

It is the only design work we recommend doing when you first start planning your wedding. It guides so many of the  early decisions – from selecting your venue to booking every vendor – we encourage our clients to explore these important preferences prior to booking anything. 

The reason is because there is so much clarity when you have a defined design aesthetic.

A defined design aesthetic is one of the most powerful tools you can have when starting your event design work because it: 

• ensures cohesion and consistency throughout your event. 
• creates a guide for decisions that ensures alignment.
• instills confidence for all future decisions 

Honing in on exactly how to define and what to include in your design aesthetic – can be more complex than you would like when you sit down and get started.

We put together a free step by step guide outlining everything you need to complete this step! Keeping it short, simple and sweet. Grab your guide and the confidence to ensure you have a vision that will guide your way through the next three facets of the design process. 

Create The Vision

After you successfully navigated the first two phases of the event planning experience guided by the identification of your vision, its time to curate the vision. 

So what exactly does this mean? 

For our design clients and our modern wedding planning community, we start with a questionnaire that provides insight into the verbal descriptions of what you want your event experience to be, what you want your event to look like, and what inspires you. 

The questionnaire explores critical facets of your story, and your dreams and hopes for your wedding. It also includes important logistical details about your event flow, and event space usage. 

We dive deep into aesthetic, function, experience, and story elements before heading to visuals. 

From there we start to pull imagery to represent vignette concepts. And more often than not its not full images but rather pieces of images that when brought together represent something truly unique. Something fresh. Something never seen before. 

This is because it represents you. 

The visual concepts help bring to life your verbal descriptions and align with the experience you desire to create. 

This process is iterative. And the event grows slowly with each confirmed concept and vignette. All of which comes together in a polished product to then be used to communicate and produce the event. 

 

Communicate + Produce The Vision 

This is a critical piece of the design process as it ensures your full vendor team is on the same page when it comes time to produce and execute your event. 

We utilized the product from above to have design meetings to discuss in detail each concept and vignette – walking through piece by piece how each element will be produced. 

With our design clients, we traditionally hold these meetings with the design based vendors at various times throughout the production phase: 

• Floral designers
• Production teams 
• Rental elements 
• Linens 
• Stationary 
• Day of Products 

 

And then we dive deep into those small details that pull tied it all together. It’s a methodical process that takes the design pieces and marries them with the logistical elements. 

From here we ensure that the experience elements – the facets that create those moments of delight – are woven meticulously into as many touch points as possible. 

It’s this level of attention to detail that is needed to create an event experience that is entirely unique to you. And why we wholeheartedly feel the value of a design plan is one of the most critical elements of the planning process. 

Looking for more design guidance. We’d love to support you. Here are a few ways we can help: 

• Book a complimentary consultation – we only take on a few design events per event season! 
• Join our modern wedding community to get access to our full event design approach! 
• If you are an event planner looking to add design services, I have something for you! Join the waitlist here to be the first to know when it goes live! 

Vendors:

Photography

Creative Direction, Design, Styling 

Florals

Hair + Makeup 

Tabletop Rentals

Calligraphy + Paper 

Rentals