Designing your wedding aesthetic is part of the bespoke planning experience with us. Developing your vision from fragmented ideas, images and inspirations into a showstopping, immersive experience for you and your guests is all part of the journey. While this looks a little different for every couple, there are five stages we usually go through to create a wedding design. There is no ‘signature’ Elegante style because we curate weddings that feel simultaneously absolutely true to you, and unbelievably unique – exceeding your expectations with something that is utterly, fabulously familiar and extraordinary.
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This guide will:
- Show you around each of the five stages of designing a wedding brief
- Explore how this translates into real life on your big day
- Touch on the idea of ‘theming’ a wedding
- Demystify the process for couples with no idea where to start
- Give you our favourite design resources to gather your inspiration
5 Steps to Designing Your Wedding
Step 1: The Inspiration Phase
Designing your wedding begins with bringing me your inspiration. I’d like to preface this by saying that no matter how many or how few ideas you have about how you’d like your wedding to look, we’ll find the golden threads to pull on that will make your day look and feel absolutely unforgettable.
Some couples come to me overflowing with design inspiration collected over several months or even years – Instagram images, Pinterest pins, bookmarked web pages…you name it. Some couples have little or no physical inspiration to show me, but either way this is where we begin. After almost a decade of wedding planning, I have a special knack for knowing exactly how to help you figure out what you want. During the inspiration phase, I’ll find out what you’re visualising (or not visualising) for your wedding day, even if you’re not sure yourself yet.
Example 1:
Couple A came to me with a clear vision: very classic, very elegant, white and green. This was a clear starting point, the base concept of which didn’t need much further development from me (apart from the details, which we’ll come onto in steps 2 and 3!).
Example 2:
Couple B weren’t really sure what they wanted their wedding to look like. They knew they didn’t want anything overly lavish, nothing too over the top, and wanted their destination wedding venue to really speak for itself. I advised them that we’d need to find a balanced middle ground. For their big 240 person wedding in a beautiful location, it simply wouldn’t work to have a design that was too pared back and simple. This is where the concept of finding an anchor comes into play…
Step 2: Anchoring The Design
In the process of designing your wedding, we start with your inspiration. The next phase is to curate and ‘anchor’ all those ideas, transforming them into a coherent design brief that makes sense of all the different elements you’ve fallen in love with. We create a design brief document for each of our couples to give a general feeling of the vibe we are curating, without going into too much detail at this stage.
In the case of Couple B, we needed to find an anchor to develop the wedding design from. We had the idea to really embrace the country they were getting married in and celebrate their venue, so we dialled in on one special feature to build the whole aesthetic around. The orange trees growing in the venue’s grounds were perfect as our aesthetic anchor – a gorgeous starting point for a colour scheme, simplistic by nature, and celebratory of the surroundings.
Step 3: Developing the design brief
At this point, after we’ve presented the general moodboard for a ‘vibe check’, it’s time to go through each stage of the wedding day and develop the details. It’s important to go deeper than colour choices or loose descriptions – are we going for something more rustic or more polished? Bright hues or muted shades? What textures will we include?
When designing your wedding, the development of the design brief is an important stage. It’s the first time you’ll see the concept as a whole and through each part of your wedding day, so we spend a lot of time on this before presenting it to you for your comments. Some of the things we’ll include are:
- Images of different chuppah styles or ceremony configurations
- Ideas about the types of florals we can use
- Proposed colour combinations
- Inspiration for every detail, including personal flowers, the dinner tables, rentals (chairs and furniture), stationery, napkins, candles…
When we present these design briefs to our couples, they are by no means finished – at this point we talk through every element together to find out what you do and don’t like, so we can further develop the design. For example, one of our 2025 brides isn’t a fan of roses, so the example florals we’d included weren’t quite the right fit. Once we’ve reached a point where the design brief is looking and feeling aligned for our couples, we can move on to stage 3 – sharing with your suppliers.
Step 4: sharing the brief with suppliers
To ensure everybody is on the same page with your wedding design, we share the design brief with suppliers such as your florist, stationer and even production (lighting, sound, staging etc.). As a wedding wedding planner I consider my role to be a bit like the conductor of an orchestra or a master baker, bringing all the different musicians (or ingredients) together to create something beautiful. This is where that orchestration starts.
Once our design brief is passed on to each of your suppliers, they usually go and create their own individual proposals – the end product is a series of more detailed design guides, from suppliers such as your florist, stationery designer, caterer, rental company, linen hire…we’re very conscious that, at this stage, it can become overwhelming. Often our couples struggle to visualise how this will all come together, marrying the details with the overall design, because there are so many different briefs.
Here are two things we do to navigate that:
- Firstly, we will go through the detailed proposals individually with our couples. This is important because you never know where a small detail may be a little off; slightly the wrong colour, the level of density of a floral installation, or the fold on a napkin. We ensure our couples are happy with each detail of the design briefs, and then move on to creating a holistic picture of the vision that is easier to make sense of
- The next step is to put together visualisations of the entire wedding space, so our couples can really get a feel for how all these individual moving pieces will come together
Step 5: The Illustration
At this point, I bring in an illustrator. I work regularly with the fantastic Andri Benson who creates beautiful wedding artwork, sending her all the different elements for her to transform into an illustration of the overall room or space, tables, chuppah and so on.
Below you can see illustrations created by Andri for our recent wedding at The Savoy, side by side with images of the room on the day – you can see just how wonderfully Andri was able to capture the essence of the wedding ahead of time, enabling the couple to truly visualise how everything would look.
We don’t ‘do’ nasty surprises at Elegante by Michelle J – the only thing we want you to be surprised by on your wedding day is that it’s even more incredible than you imagined!
Designing your wedding through these 5 rough stages enables us to develop a brief that has creative flair, feels like it could only ever be yours, and makes perfect sense to your suppliers and you. You might also be interested in:
Designing your wedding abroad vs at home – is there a difference?
The process is essentially the same whether we’re working on a destination wedding or one in your home country. One of the major differences we do encounter is a variance in the roles that suppliers take in other countries. For example, in some European countries it’s common for the florist to handle much of the table decor and even wedding day signage as well as all the flowers. For our couples, nothing much changes – we still go through the same steps and presentations.
What are the best design resources for gathering wedding inspiration?
It can be overwhelming to know where to start with gathering inspiration for your wedding design. The most popular choices are to turn to Instagram and Pinterest and start saving images of things you love or feel drawn to – but in these online spaces it’s more important than ever to be aware of AI imagery giving false representations of what’s possible, and the fact that you can never tell how much anything costs.
Our advice is to seek inspiration from people you know and trust on these platforms, names you recognise and those with good industry reputations. If you need help with this, we can point you in the right direction.
You can also take the old-fashioned route and pick up a wedding 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 love. Take a look at the Elegante by Michelle J portfolio as a starting point.
Should you plan for a wedding ‘theme’?
While we don’t regularly work on the basis of themes for our couples weddings, sometimes we get a couple who particularly wants one – and we love it! We like to assure engaged couples that themes don’t have to be cheesy or over-the-top, and can actually be executed tastefully and in an elevated manner. Examples of themed weddings we’ve planned in the past:
Spooky Halloween Themed Wedding
How to choose a wedding colour scheme?
Your wedding colour scheme is a good starting point for building out your design and vision. Our tips for choosing your colour palette are:
- Don’t get boxed in to just choosing colours or combinations you like or are regularly drawn to
- Take inspiration from your surroundings, and work with your venue – a space with strong colours on the walls likely can’t take too many bold brights or heavy patternwork, for example, while a blank canvas venue can cope with a bit more
- Be open to considering variations on your colour scheme, particularly when it comes to working with suppliers such as your florist. The available flowers may not exactly match your hex codes!
- Remember that the classics are classics for a reason – well-loved colour combinations are tried and tested, and are a good place to start if you’re feeling stuck. You can always add to them or put your own twist on a colour palette, but don’t be afraid of starting from something that’s been done before
Discover a few of our Elegante wedding designs using the links below, and get in touch to talk about your own 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 different one!) modern green and whites
G&T’s blush ballroom at The Savoy