I just got married myself (woo go me!) to the beautiful Kellyanne and I thought as you’re planning your own wedding day I’d drop you some tips on what helped us, and what we wished we had done in hindsight.
Sadly I was told I wasn’t allowed to take my own wedding photos 🫤
BE CREATIVE BUT CLEVER
There are literally thousands of weddings every year, and if you’re anything like us you want to be “different” and not follow the crowd, making our day memorable for everyone involved was paramount for us. After all I attend a lot more weddings than most, and I knew what would be good for us and what wouldn’t. We also didn’t want to spend a bomb (we failed) and wanted to DIY a lot of things.
Both Kellyanne and I are “creative” and for the first time in our relationship (Couple Goals) we agreed on a creative vision around the wedding colour scheme and fonts, it was literally one of the first things we decided on for the wedding, and I got to work making a website, Save the Dates, Invites etc.
What we hadn’t thought about was the matching of printed colours to materials for dresses and suits. Also, the ability to easily cut and print fonts with a Cricut for our wedding signs. Naturally our lilac and eucalyptus green, evolved into 50 shades of purple, and our font needed to be made thicker before printing and cutting literally EVERYTHING!
In hindsight, create the “Wedding Brand” alongside the picking of wedding suits and dresses, and do a test print of your fonts prior to going in HARD on the invites etc, which you cant change easily down the line.
USE SPREADSHEETS
So I know that wedding planning should be exciting and spreadsheets just don’t sound that fun. But when you’re deep into wedding planning having an up-to-date list of guests, suppliers and costings can really help you stay organised.
I went quite OTT having our wedding website save the date form and RSVP forms automatically add entries into a google sheets document, which then synced with Mailchimp so I could email all of our guests and be able to give them correct information based on whether they were invited to the whole day or just the evening.
We also used it to create our seating plan and kitchen dietary plan so we could send them to the venue, it took literally no time in exporting the data and made our last-minute planning a lot easier!
In hindsight, know your guests… because I went all OCD on the spreadsheet being up to date I got a bit frustrated when less tech-literate guests wanted printed invites and failed to RSVP. Make sure you take into account that not everyone is going to follow the perfect flow that you want them to.
MAKE TIME PLANS / PHOTO LISTS
So OK OK I’m biased on this, but the most appreciated of our spreadsheets was the time plan and group photo lists we gave out to our photo/videographers.
As a wedding supplier, I knew that knowing the day plan inside out is integral to capturing the day in its entirety, whilst I make sure you will have a pre-wedding consultation to find out all the info, I know our suppliers having a document to refer to on the day was really helpful.
The MOST important thing for us was to have a list of family + friends we wanted in our group shots. When there is prosecco flowing and canapes up for grabs having a complete list of those you want in your photos makes everyone’s life easier to grab who we need!
In hindsight, we wished we let the people on the list know to expect a photo call at an approximate time, so they could be summoned promptly, the last thing you want is your best mate to be in the loo at the wrong time, and they get missed!
One last thing…
Things do and will change and potentially not go to plan, despite all the planning in the world… Don’t worry though, we’ve got this, just trust your suppliers and enjoy the best day of your lives!
If you need some advice on making the most of your day, reach out to me to arrange a free consultation we don’t just have to talk photos 😁.