From Inspiration to Reality: Making Sense of the Madness that is the Design Process

From Inspiration to Reality: Making Sense of the Madness that is the Design Process
July 02, 2014

The design process has always been one of my favorite parts of planning a wedding. I've always loved taking inspiration, ideas and design elements and weaving them into a beautiful one-of-a-kind event. With the arrival of Pinterest and an ever growing list of amazing inspirational resources available in today's digital world, I can barely remember how I managed to design a wedding before their existence.

And while we've taken huge leaps forward in the way we discover and pull together our ideas, all these things that have helped us discover and define our client's vision for a wedding have also managed to create a lot more work for me as a wedding planner.


 

Consider this: from each client, I would receive an average of:

  • 6 to 10 Pinterest boards, with dozens of images in each
  • 20 emails with various photo attachments (some with neatly organized notes, some without)
  • 1 or 2 texts with photos or random thoughts
  • notes about ideas, likes and dislikes in various forms
  • a handful of magazine tear sheets
  • a few ribbon and fabric swatches
  • a short stack of paint chips from a local hardware store (my favorite)

 

And then, of course, no two clients were the same!  Others had collected their ideas on other inspiration discovery platforms, such as Lover.ly or We Heart It (among a long list of other amazing websites), and many had inspiration and ideas spread across the interwebs.

As a seasoned planner, once i was able to track down the various points of inspiration (which took a fair amount of time), i could easily start to understand and pinpoint their style and preferences, but then the challenge that laid ahead (and the thing that took the most amount of time) was organizing all these ideas and the thoughts behind each idea, so that I could easily share them with the various design vendors who would then help me turn these ideas and concepts into tangible reality.

Making sense of all this madness took forever, and then combining these images + descriptions + notes + colors into an organized manner to take these ideas to the next step in the planning process took even longer. We found ourselves wondering if there was a better way to utilize all the amazing resources available online, but do more with the images and ideas found, in a fraction of the time. The idea behind Aisle Planner's Design Studio was born.

With all this in mind, we set out to create a beautiful, inspiring platform that supports a design workflow that's highly organized, highly efficient (and did we mention, highly addictive?)  Defining your vision for a wedding and then doing MORE with that vision has never been easier.  To that we say, "it's about time!"

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Aisle Planner's Design Studio automatically pulls out the predominant color swatches from each image you save into Style Guides so you can use them to create Color Palettes for each aspect of the wedding.
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Color Palettes created in Aisle Planner's Design Studio, using color swatches pulled from saved photos or using our custom color picker tool. 

We'll be detailing out some of our suggestions on how best to use Aisle Planner's Design Studio in the coming week, and one of these days, we'll get around to making a fancy video tutorial or two.  Until then, dive on in to our Design Studio and have some fun.  And as always, if we can be of any assistance at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to us for personalized support at: customercare@aisleplanner.com.

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About the Author

Headshot of Aisle Planner founder, Christina Farrow
Christina Farrow
Aisle Planner, Founder & Chief Product Officer
As Aisle Planner's Founder and Chief Product Officer, Christina Farrow spends her days dreaming up ways to empower wedding professionals to lead more balanced (and more organized) lives. She loves few things more than her toes in the sand, a glass of Prosecco, and the promise of a great adventure with hubby, daughter and Caucasian Shepherd pup by her side.