Designing your wedding aesthetic is an element of the bespoke planning experience with us. Developing your vision from fragmented ideas, images and inspirations right into a showstopping, immersive experience for you and your guests is all a part of the journey. While this looks a bit of different for each couple, there are five stages we normally undergo to create a marriage design. There is no such thing as a ‘signature’ Elegante style because we curate weddings that feel concurrently absolutely true to you, and unbelievably unique – exceeding your expectations with something that’s utterly, fabulously familiar and extraordinary.
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This guide will:
- Show you around each of the five stages of designing a marriage transient
- Explore how this translates into real life in your big day
- Touch on the thought of ‘theming’ a marriage
- Demystify the method for couples with no idea where to begin
- Offer you our favourite design resources to assemble your inspiration
5 Steps to Designing Your Wedding
Step 1: The Inspiration Phase
Designing your wedding begins with bringing me your inspiration. I’d prefer to preface this by saying that regardless of what number of or how few ideas you’ve about the way you’d like your wedding to look, we’ll find the golden threads to tug on that may make your day appear and feel absolutely unforgettable.
Some couples come to me overflowing with design inspiration collected over several months and even years – Instagram images, Pinterest pins, bookmarked web pages…you name it. Some couples have little or no physical inspiration to indicate me, but either way that is where we start. After almost a decade of wedding planning, I even have a special knack for knowing exactly tips on how to provide help to determine what you wish. Throughout the inspiration phase, I’ll discover what you’re visualising (or not visualising) in your wedding day, even in case you’re unsure yourself yet.
Example 1:
Couple A got here to me with a transparent vision: very classic, very elegant, white and green. This was a transparent start line, the bottom concept of which didn’t need much further development from me (other than the main points, which we’ll come onto in steps 2 and three!).
Example 2:
Couple B weren’t really sure what they wanted their wedding to appear like. They knew they didn’t want anything overly lavish, nothing too excessive, and wanted their destination wedding venue to essentially speak for itself. I advised them that we’d need to search out a balanced middle ground. For his or her big 240 person wedding in a gorgeous location, it simply wouldn’t work to have a design that was too pared back and easy. That is where the concept of finding an anchor comes into play…
Step 2: Anchoring The Design
Within the strategy of designing your wedding, we start along with your inspiration. The following phase is to curate and ‘anchor’ all those ideas, transforming them right into a coherent design transient that is sensible of all the several elements you’ve fallen in love with. We create a design transient document for every of our couples to offer a general feeling of the vibe we’re curating, without going into an excessive amount of detail at this stage.
Within the case of Couple B, we would have liked to search out an anchor to develop the marriage design from. We had the thought to essentially embrace the country they were getting married in and have fun their venue, so we dialled in on one special feature to construct the entire aesthetic around. The orange trees growing within the venue’s grounds were perfect as our aesthetic anchor – a beautiful start line for a color scheme, simplistic by nature, and celebratory of the environment.
Step 3: Developing the design transient
At this point, after we’ve presented the overall moodboard for a ‘vibe check’, it’s time to undergo each stage of the marriage day and develop the main points. It’s essential to go deeper than color decisions or loose descriptions – are we going for something more rustic or more polished? Brilliant hues or muted shades? What textures will we include?
When designing your wedding, the event of the design transient is a crucial stage. It’s the primary time you’ll see the concept as an entire and thru each a part of your wedding day, so we spend a number of time on this before presenting it to you in your comments. A number of the things we’ll include are:
- Images of various chuppah styles or ceremony configurations
- Ideas concerning the varieties of florals we are able to use
- Proposed color mixtures
- Inspiration for each detail, including personal flowers, the dinner tables, rentals (chairs and furniture), stationery, napkins, candles…
After we present these design briefs to our couples, they’re on no account finished – at this point we talk through every element together to search out out what you do and don’t like, so we are able to further develop the design. For instance, one in all our 2025 brides isn’t a fan of roses, so the instance florals we’d included weren’t quite the suitable fit. Once we’ve reached a degree where the design transient is feeling and looking aligned for our couples, we are able to move on to stage 3 – sharing along with your suppliers.
Step 4: sharing the transient with suppliers
To make sure everybody is on the identical page along with your wedding design, we share the design transient with suppliers reminiscent of your florist, stationer and even production (lighting, sound, staging etc.). As a marriage wedding planner I consider my role to be a bit just like the conductor of an orchestra or a master baker, bringing all the several musicians (or ingredients) together to create something beautiful. That is where that orchestration starts.
Once our design transient is passed on to every of your suppliers, they sometimes go and create their very own individual proposals – the tip product is a series of more detailed design guides, from suppliers reminiscent of your florist, stationery designer, caterer, rental company, linen hire…we’re very conscious that, at this stage, it could possibly turn out to be overwhelming. Often our couples struggle to visualise how it will all come together, marrying the main points with the general design, because there are so many various briefs.
Listed here are two things we do to navigate that:
- Firstly, we are going to undergo the detailed proposals individually with our couples. This is very important since you never know where a small detail could also be a bit of off; barely the flawed color, the extent of density of a floral installation, or the fold on a napkin. We ensure our couples are blissful with each detail of the design briefs, after which move on to making a holistic picture of the vision that is simpler to make sense of
- The following step is to place together visualisations of your complete wedding space, so our couples can really get a feel for a way all these individual moving pieces will come together
Step 5: The Illustration
At this point, I herald an illustrator. I work usually with the improbable Andri Benson who creates beautiful wedding artwork, sending her all the several elements for her to remodel into an illustration of the general room or space, tables, chuppah and so forth.
Below you’ll be able to see illustrations created by Andri for our recent wedding at The Savoy, side by side with images of the room on the day – you’ll be able to see just how splendidly Andri was in a position to capture the essence of the marriage ahead of time, enabling the couple to actually visualise how every part would look.
We don’t ‘do’ nasty surprises at Elegante by Michelle J – the one thing we would like you to be surprised by in your wedding day is that it’s much more incredible than you imagined!
I WANT THIS
Designing your wedding through these 5 rough stages enables us to develop a transient that has creative flair, seems like it could only ever be yours, and makes perfect sense to your suppliers and you. You may also be focused on:
Designing your wedding abroad vs at home – is there a difference?
The method is actually the identical whether we’re working on a destination wedding or one in your property country. One among the key differences we do encounter is a variance within the roles that suppliers soak up other countries. For instance, in some European countries it’s common for the florist to handle much of the table decor and even wedding day signage in addition to all of the flowers. For our couples, nothing much changes – we still undergo the identical steps and presentations.
What are the perfect design resources for gathering wedding inspiration?
It will probably be overwhelming to know where to begin with gathering inspiration in your wedding design. The most well-liked decisions are to show to Instagram and Pinterest and begin saving images of belongings you love or feel drawn to – but in these online spaces it’s more essential than ever to pay attention to AI imagery giving false representations of what’s possible, and the very fact you can never tell how much anything costs.
Our advice is to hunt inspiration from people you realize and trust on these platforms, names you recognise and people with good industry reputations. Should you need assistance with this, we are able to point you in the suitable direction.
It’s also possible to take the old-fashioned route and pick up a marriage magazine to flick through (do people still cut things out and stick them in scrapbooks!?), and browse the portfolios of wedding planners, florists, stationers etc whose work you like. Take a take a look at the Elegante by Michelle J portfolio as a start line.
Must you plan for a marriage ‘theme’?
While we don’t usually work on the premise of themes for our couples weddings, sometimes we get a pair who particularly wants one – and we adore it! We prefer to assure engaged couples that themes don’t must be cheesy or over-the-top, and might actually be executed tastefully and in an elevated manner. Examples of themed weddings we’ve planned previously:
Mary Poppins London Wedding
Spooky Halloween Themed Wedding
How one can select a marriage color scheme?
Your wedding color scheme is start line for constructing out your design and vision. Our suggestions for selecting your color palette are:
- Don’t get boxed in to only selecting colors or mixtures you want or are usually drawn to
- Take inspiration out of your surroundings, and work along with your venue – an area with strong colors on the partitions likely can’t take too many daring brights or heavy patternwork, for instance, while a blank canvas venue can address a bit more
- Be open to considering variations in your color scheme, particularly on the subject of working with suppliers reminiscent of your florist. The available flowers may not exactly match your hex codes!
- Keep in mind that the classics are classics for a reason – well-loved color mixtures are tried and tested, and are place to begin in case you’re feeling stuck. You’ll be able to all the time add to them or put your personal twist on a color palette, but don’t be afraid of ranging from something that’s been done before
Discover a number of of our Elegante wedding designs using the links below, and get in contact to speak about your personal wedding planning journey.
T&M’s Tuscan welcome party – lemons and chinoiserie
A&A’s enchanted Florentine garden – decadent pinks and reds
N&M’s chandelier-draped celebrations in Rome, featured on La Lista
N&M’s (a distinct one!) modern green and whites
G&T’s blush ballroom at The Savoy
