Get coffee, sharpen pencil…be inspired?!

So you’ve got to come up with a wonderfully creative idea for an event? Where do you start (apart from getting coffee and sharpening your pencil)?

 Whether you’re an event plannerworking on a big budget brief or a bride planning her wedding reception, the creative process must begin with a vision.  Wonderfully designed events don’t happen by accident.  Start by asking yourself three questions:

  1. What is the aim of your event?
  2. How do you want your guests to feel during and after the event?
  3. Are you trying to make a statement about yourself or your brand, or how it will reflect your personality?

I’m sure we’ve all been to events that feel entirely generic; it’s as if the event organiser just copied and pasted the entire plan from the last one.

After you have answered these questions, try and distill the answers into a theme for your event. How? Imagine you are planning a 70th birthday party for your father and decide that, as he enjoys country pursuits and loves wine, you’re going to go with the theme of ‘the shooting party’. A mood board for such an event might look like this:

So how does the theme become a mood board? In this case, imagine you want (reasonably) masculine colours; the pheasant feathers give a nice colour palette to work with and alludes to the shooting party theme; you want the food to be hearty, as it might be if you’d just spent a day on the moors. Now start flicking through magazines or look on the internet for images that might be a useful snippet. Collect lots and add to the pile over a few days. Come back to it a while later and you’ll find that some just jump out at you as details you’d like to bring to life…that’s the first draft of your moodboard.