How to Pick Your Wedding Colors

Arguably the most prominent element of design is color. It’s what most design clients want help with—whether it’s choosing a main color, or making sure secondary colors work together with the main color to create a mood or feeling.

With so many colors it can be hard to know where to start when trying to decide on a color scheme. Here are a few of the questions I would ask at a design consultation to help narrow down colors:

What kind of mood do you want to set at your wedding? Casual, glamorous, playful, fun?

Have you already chosen our venue? What does it look like, and what colors are already there?

What colors are you most drawn to?

What colors are you least drawn to?

What season is your wedding taking place?

What colors are brought about in your mind after answering these questions? Color is a very personal and unique experience—no color combination is inherently wrong. Of course, some colors clash when used together, and some are displeasing to the eye, but it’s ALL personal preference. So don’t overthink it!

There are many, many ways to mix and match colors. Without going too far into the nitty gritty details of color theory, let’s focus on these three attributes of color: hue, tints, and shades.

Hue: The main property of color. How we describe colors. Ie. red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, etc.

Tint: White is mixed with a hue.

Shade: Black is mixed with a hue.

Knowing this basic terminology will help you better communicate your color preference with your vendors. Which brings us to....

Why being specific about your color preference is important.

When talking with your vendors, it’s critical to be specific about the colors you want in your wedding. Just saying you want green and pink incorporated can mean different things to different vendors. Emerald green or spring green? Magenta or dusty pink? The more adjectives you use to describe your colors the better your vendors will be able to narrow down exactly what color you mean. Then, on your wedding day you won’t be surprised by a color you didn’t want included.

Remember, don’t overthink your color choices. If you like the combination, go for it and be specific when communicating it.

Happy color picking!

The Elements and Principles of Event Design

For our first wedding design post, let’s start with the basics and discuss the elements and principles of design.

As a graphic designer, this was the first thing I learned in school, and it’s relevant to any design field-- including event design.

The elements of design are the pieces that make up design. There are six elements:

• Color: light reflected off objects.

• Line: a mark with greater length than width

• Shape: a closed line. Shapes are flat.

• Form: a 3-D shape

• Texture: surface quality that can be seen or felt

• Space: the area between or around objects.

The principles of design are how the elements are used together to make a complete piece of work. Let’s look at real wedding images to help define some of the more prominent principles:

1. Balance: the distribution of the visual weight of objects, colors, texture, and space. Here, balance is created with the long rectangular tables, paired with the smaller round tables.  

Photo by Olivia Jacob

2. Proportion: when all parts of design (size, number) relate well to each other. At this wedding, the tall floral arrangements fill the space between the tabletops and the ceiling, giving the room and decor a sense of proportion to each other.

Photo by Charles Archambault

3. Emphasis: the part of a design that catches your attention. At Julia and Phil’s wedding the white globe lanterns are the largest piece of design and immediately draw your eye up into the reception space.

Photo by De Neuva Photography

4. Movement: the path your eye takes around a design or space. At Katelyn and Matt’s wedding their florist added bunches of flowers at the top of each column in the tent and floral globes at the peak of the ceiling. This helps guide your eye around the entire reception space.

Photo by Jessica Latos Photography

5. Repetition: when an object is repeated. This can create patterns and help the design feel cohesive. At Nisha and Derek’s wedding, their custom table runners were placed at every table, creating a pattern and making the room feel cohesive. The string lighting is also an example of repetition in the space.

Photo by Photo Lady Love

6. Variety: the use of several elements to hold your attention and guide your eye. This wedding incorporated plenty of variety! They’ve woven together many complementary colors, different style plates, and mismatched chairs. It adds interest and personality.

Photo by De Neuva Photography

7. Unity: a feeling of harmony between all parts of a design, which creates a sense of wholeness. At this wedding, they chose a neutral palette of tans and greens. The burlap tablecloths paired with tins of garden-like greenery create a cohesive modern-rustic look that doesn’t feel overdone.

Photo by Amber Wilke

There are many different ways to incorporate design principles into your wedding, so don’t be overwhelmed! Just being aware of them will help you better communicate your design vision to your vendors. But, if you’re still not confident you can execute your design vision on your own, check out The Plannery’s design services. We’d love to help!

Our next post will dive into everyone’s most discussed element of design: color!

Announcing - Event Design with The Plannery!

Event design is coming to The Plannery!

Many of you know that ever since the beginning, I have always viewed myself as a logistics-only person. While I do think I have a fairly good eye, and I've obviously learned a lot over my years of planning weddings about what works well and what doesn't, I have never studied design. I often get the question from potential clients as to whether I also do event design. And that answer, for a long time, was "no." Not considering myself anything close to an expert in the area of design, I've never felt comfortable calling myself an event designer. But I was disappointed that I couldn't provide those services to my clients.

And then Kim came along. I actually coordinated Kim's wedding. She was awesome to work with, and did some amazing DIY design pieces for her own wedding (see here). She reached out to me post-wedding to express her interest in partnering with The Plannery. She, unlike me, is an actual designer. As in, she holds a B.A. in Media Arts and Design and is a full time graphic designer - she therefore has a killer eye and is great at creating cohesive visual plans for event design.

As many of my current clients know, we've been testing out the relationship and the process this past year. Slowly rolling it out to see what works and what doesn't, and whether clients were even interested!

And so I'm thrilled to finally announce that The Plannery will officially be offering some great add-on packages to our current services to those interested in event design assistance. Many of my clients are very hands-on, but find they want resources and assistance to narrow down decisions. We're taking that same approach for event design and I'm really excited to offer my clients these new design options! More info is on our website now, and we'll be doing a series of blog posts this week to tell you more, including hearing from Kim herself and more details on the services!

Save

Save

Save