How to Give Designers + Planners Feedback

As planners, Tapestry Event Co. guides couples to vendors that we think will vibe with their vision, style, and personality. But when it comes to nurturing those relationships and expressing needs, the communication is down to the couple. We can always act as an in-between, but we prefer for couples to be able to openly communicate about their visions with their vendors. Below, we have interviewed a variety of vendors on how best to share feedback, when in the process it is invited, and what you need to know before working with them.

PLANNERS + DESIGNERS.

from Kate of Tapestry Event Co.

Hi there! I’m Kate, Founder + Creative Director at Tapestry Event Company. I plan adventurous weddings and elopements in my Pacific Northwest home and love every second of it. While our couples most often come to us for our logistical prowess first, there is also an element of design and creativity that draws them toward our work. We deeply value our couples’ feedback as part of our planning process for one key reason: No Tapestry event looks the same when it is focused on couple-centered design. This means that we put the couple’s values, lifestyle, taste, and self-expression into the design of the event itself. And we love doing it!

The Creative Process: Mood Boards.

We walk through a series of meetings and activities to understand these key elements in our couples, then supplement by asking for visual inspiration vis-a-vis Pinterest boards or blogs with lots of imagery.

After we’ve created a swath of information and inspiration, we dive into the design with our industry knowledge and event experience. We match a couple’s style with the context of their venue, then begin to layer in design details based on our knowledge of local inventory, artisans, and vendors. We are careful to avoid recommendations that require disproportionate investments to a couple’s stated values, or that are wasteful or one-time-use items. We approach event design as an ecosystem of personal style, budget, values, and smooth logistics.

Our design ideas land in something called a mood board. It’s important to understand the purpose and function of a mood board relative to the planning process. A great way to think about a mood board is as the visual directive to your celebration. The intention of a mood board is to capture the aesthetic and creative details of your event. A mood board is NOT intended to be a sturdy, logistical document. Our goal with any mood board is to provide the team of vendors with a visual concept that they can align their contributions with. It’s a document your vendors can return to in order to recalibrate or refocus on the aesthetic outcome of their contribution. It keeps everyone in alignment, working towards the same or similar design outcomes. By putting these images together in a document, each member of your team can better understand how their role fits into the scope of the larger event design.

For example:, in a consultation with a vendor, you will talk a lot about the “what” and “how much” of your event. With a florist, you might discuss how many bouquets, or centerpieces, or installations you want. But rarely can you communicate the “what it looks like” with words. You need pictures to do that. 

What’s on a Planner’s Mood Board

A mood board is a strategic amalgamation of all the images that best represent what you want each aspect of your event to look like. When we put together a mood board, we are sure to include a cover page with summary images, the couple’s name/date/location, and a unifying color palette. Our mood board then dedicates one page to each area of focus in the event. Some examples might include bride or groom style, paper products, ceremony space, or florals. We make sure that every major element or area of focus has its own page, even if some of the images repeat between pages. If there is imagery chosen with a specific purpose, we will include limited text descriptions in the mood board to point to the purpose of the image or the feature we are highlighting.

How To Give Feedback

Our process for refining the mood board is very interactive and encourages couple feedback. We want your raw, honest opinions so that we can deliver on our promise of a couple-centered design. We typically send the first draft of the mood board accompanied by questions we want our couples to answer. We ask specific questions about the event design based on what we know about our couple’s preferences and event logistics. We will highlight design constraints, like limited availability of items or vendors. Some helpful questions that all couples consider as part of the feedback process include:

• Does the color palette reflect your wedding style? Does it include the colors you want to emphasize and complementary colors that will balance the palette? What would you change?

• Do the images capture the attitude you want to evoke? What would you change?

• Do the captions for each page match your intentions and decisions? What would you change?

• Do the details included emphasize some of the design ideas you want to bring to life? What would you change?

• Is there anything we missed?

Images courtesy of Jessika Christine Photography.

Your feedback on a mood board is most helpful and effective if:

• You enter the planning relationship with a design direction of vibe. It’s not uncommon to see Pinterest boards that evolve with time, especially if you’ve had your wedding board for a few years and have run through cycles of trends. We will often weigh your most recent pictures more heavily than older pictures, but it still helps to clean up your board a bit before we start to work with it.

• You do your homework and consider the mood board once or twice in advance of sharing feedback. Consider its purpose and use that filter to focus your feedback. Remember that the board is visual and conceptual, not logistical and specific. So long as the final images capture the vibe and direction of your event, then we are in business.

• You are 1,000% honest with your thoughts and feelings. Even if they are fuzzy or unclear, say them messy and we will help you sort them out. Trust your gut and share openly. We are pretty darn good at helping channel your feelings and instincts into a beautiful end result. :D

— Kate, Tapestry Creative Director + Founder