Wedding Design Advice: How to Design Your Wedding Day

Let’s talk about design for a bit. It’s the most exciting part of planning your wedding for some brides and the most difficult thing for others. Not everyone has the creative gene and it’s completely fine if you decide to hire a wedding designer. That’s what we are here for. To help you figure out how to make sense of your wedding vision and bring it all together in a cohesive and beautiful way. If you are ready to jump right into designing your wedding, this blog is really going to help you get started.

Say Hello to Your Hudson Valley Wedding Designer

Before I dive into all the details of designing, I’d like to introduce myself. I am the owner of Elite and have designed weddings for 8 years now. I started out loving the logistics of planning weddings but found my calling in helping couples do both, plan and design their day. You can read more about me here. Now let’s get started on the design process.

The Basics of Wedding Design

Since this is your first and only time designing a wedding or event, let me walk you through some basics of designing. These three steps are key to starting the design process off right and making things easier. These steps are part of the process I use in designing weddings for my clients.

1. Create a floor plan

Before you get started thinking about colors or flowers, you want to decide on how you are going to layout the space. It doesn’t matter if you have a barn, a ballroom, or a tent venue, you need a layout. We use special software that lets us do this to scale. If you don’t have access to any software or you are doing this for the first time, take some measurements of the space and sketch it out on paper. You want to do this for the ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception. I always say you can’t design your wedding if you don’t know how much space you are working with.

Here’s a sample layout from a past wedding we planned at Helsinki Hudson.

2. Choose your design process

Now that you have the floor plan down, it’s time to choose a design method. There are two ways to work through wedding design. The first is design starting with your tables and working your way out to the perimeter of the room. The other is starting with the perimeter and working your way inward. Most couples will start with the tables and work their way out. That’s the easiest method and also works well for any budget. No matter which method you choose, keep in mind that the starting point will inspire the rest of your design. For example, if you are starting with your tables, you might start by selecting a table linen. These will become an inspiration for your invitation design, day-of paper items and other table design elements.

3. Create a Mood Board

Once you have a floor plan and have decided on your design process, it’s time to create a mood or vision board for the design. I would suggest starting with finding 7-10 images that represent the feel and look you want for your wedding day. You can look for inspiration in home decor to beautifully designed events that inspire you. My favorite places to look for inspiration are fashion, home interiors, and hotels or resorts. This will help you decide on a color palette too. If you are still thinking about your color palette check out the blog I wrote on Wedding Color Palettes here. Look for images that resonate with you and pull colors from the images. This is going to be something you share with other vendors like your florist and stationery designer.

Check out our sample mood board from the Helsinki Hudson wedding below.

You can check out some of the weddings we’ve designed on our portfolio page here to get some ideas as well.

Bonus Design Advice:  I encourage you to step outside your comfort zone and do something different. Be spontaneous, go against the grain, and do something you don’t see on social media. It’s okay to be inspired by someone else’s design but put your own twist on it. Make it your own. For example, if you really like long farm tables but want to put your own take on it try making your layout a little bit unique in setup rather than the traditional connecting of all the tables into a really long one. You could even mix things up with some long farm tables and round tables with linens.

If thinking outside the box doesn’t come easy to you that’s okay because you can hire a wedding designer so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed. Working with a wedding designer allows you to feel inspired and share your ideas with someone who can help you make your wedding unique to you.

I hope this got you inspired to start working on designing your wedding day. You can check out the full wedding day design of th example I use here on our portfolio page here.