You’re engaged! Let the wedding planning begins…

When you first get engaged and dive into thinking about how you want your wedding to look and feel, it’s so easy to get lost down a Pinterest rabbit hole, collecting millions of either wildly varying images or 20 versions of the same thing. Or spend hours on Instagram in a scroll loop, getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of wedding imagery to filter through and work out what you want, thus losing the gorgeous initial joy and excitement and feeling pressure and stress instead. Let’s avoid that!

I want to take your hand and gentle guide you away from those two well known platforms, and steer you towards some refreshing sources of inspiration available away from the hordes! Here’s my top ten wedding inspiration sources to pull into designing a wedding, curated to make sure you have a unique wedding theme that’s personal to you both as a couple, whilst looking gorgeous, contemporary and a photographer’s dream.

1. Real life - Art installations, exhibitions, museums shops

Ok let’s start with the obvious one, real life! I love stepping away from all the devices and getting into a place of pure discovery and chance encounters with inspiration. There’s lot of richness to be found visiting a gallery, a museum, art exhibitions, installations and events. I recently visited a gorgeous paper/stationery/gift shop near me in South East London and discovered an amazing Terrazzo patterned paper that I went on to use to create some re-usable wedding table numbers (The Completist was the name of the shop). This was a chance encounter I didn’t plan or find online.

Ideas you might gather - the guest experience, how people move around a venue or space, patterns for wedding decorations from the art or displays themselves - the list is endless on this one!

2. Travel - Hotels - interiors, drink ideas, menu designs

Visiting another country can be inspiring for obvious reasons - falling in love with new cuisines as a couple, the exotic look of buildings outside our sometimes grey, brutalist UK landscape - I recently went to Sicily and took approximately 100 photos of Italian exteriors in hues of dark pink and terracotta, old shop signs and old doors!

A lot of visual inspiration and cues can be found in certain contemporary Hotel interiors too- interior styles and colours, textiles, furniture, wallpaper and of course, cocktail inspo 😎

A couple of pics for new sign inspiration from my Sicilian holiday this year

3. Print - newspapers and supplement mags, business cards, flyers, leaflets

There is something to be said for sensory experiences like opening a high quality, heavyweight paper envelope or being presented with a metallic foil-embossed business card. So much of our life has moved online, that these experiences are now even more special for me.

Next time you come across a piece of printed material like a business card, postcard, flyer or leaflet, you could be collecting ideas and inspiration for your own invitations, wedding stationery, menus and other printed materials.

4. Visual Advertising - billboards, telly, cinema

Instead of being annoyed by the ad break on your fave Channel 4 drama (unless you pay for the ad-free version which impatient-me definitely does 😂) then there are lots of visual clues in advertising, which often use current trends to present them back to us - irritatingly to try and sell something, but we can filter through these cues for inspiration.

It might be a colourful paper backdrop in a tv ad, a particular type of filming or photography style in the cinema you want to use as your wedding photography style, or a colour palette on a billboard poster you want to use for your wedding venue decorations and whole day.

5. Theatre sets

Designers like Es Devlin & Bunny christie

As a former Theatre Designer, there are a lot of crossovers with wedding styling. You have a theatre space (wedding venue) you are designing with an audienc (guests) in mind. I won’t draw the analogy between the wedding couple and actors, that’s too much 😂

I’m guilty of not going to as many theatre productions as I used to, but the use of lighting, furniture, props and even effects can spark some very cool, creative wedding styling ideas for your big day. Think smoke grenades and neon, as used here in Bunny Christie’s set design.

6. Fa fa fa fa Fashion (in the style of David Bowie)

OK A lot of fashion, particularly on catwalks and at Fashion Shows can be a bit too ‘zany’ for real life, but if you break it down into details you love, there is lots to be inspired by. A particular fabric type for a wedding dress, a hair accessory worn in a new way you haven’t seen before, different shoe types that can be worn with wedding dresses - gold boots anyone?

7. Non wedding inspo - visual culture design mags

One of the great things about browsing these design sites when you’re starting your wedding planning is that someone with an expert eye has already curated the articles and features so there is a level of aesthetic quality to everything you stumble across.

I can spend HOURS looking at these sites as the content and visual inspiration is SO varied and interesting but there are generally no weddings on here so you’ve got to think creatively about how some of this content could apply to your wedding styling.

I particularly like it for colour combinations, interactive guest ideas (taken from features about art installations and unique ad campaigns) shapes in interior design that could be pulled through into wedding backdrops and props, textures for wedding details that could be woven throughout your whole scheme…here are four non-wedding online sites you could browse for creative wedding inspo, keep an open mind!

TOP LEFT IN A CLOCKWISE DIRECTION -

Dezeen.com - https://www.dezeen.com/2023/08/31/tatiana-bilbao-pau-among-installations-exhibit-columbus-2023/

Wallpaper.com - https://www.wallpaper.com/travel/hotels/the-fifth-avenue-hotel-martin-brudnizki-new-york-usa

Creativeboom.com - https://www.creativeboom.com/features/independent-jewellery-designers-2023/https://www.dezeen.com/2023/08/31/tatiana-bilbao-pau-among-installations-exhibit-columbus-2023/

Eyemagazine.com - https://www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/nothing-is-real

8. Wedding websites

These sites often contain blog posts or features about real weddings (and styled shoots, a note on this later) but can be great places to start moving forward in your wedding planing by finding suppliers whose style resonates with you. There are sites specifically for festival, boho, classical weddings but my favourite - alternative, non-traditional, modern with a range of styles and trends are -

Examples:

UN-WEDDING.COM

WHIMSICALWONDERLANDWEDDINGS.COM

ROCKMYWEDDING.COM

HITCHED.CO.UK

GREENWEDDINGSHOES.COM

9. UK Wedding Supplier Directories

Examples - Rock My Wedding, Book of Love, Dream Lovers Weddings, Hitched

A lot of the big UK wedding sites have their own directories so you can skip the general browsing and head straight there. Wedding supplier directories are an excellent source of all inspiration because you’ve got Stylists, florists, cake makers, photographers, decor and stationery all in one place. You don’t have to browse 10 blog posts and scroll to the bottom to find out who the photographer was etc, you just click each category and pick which style or person matches you best as a couple.

10. Styled Wedding Shoots - a note on how to take what appeals to you and leave the rest!

Styled wedding shoots are everywhere across the internet - from Google, to Pinterest, to blogs and wedding mag websites. Sometimes real and styled weddings can be quite hard to tell apart!

Styled shoots are brilliant, in that they’re an example of what a wedding COULD be if you wanted to turned the volume all the way up and it’s where wedding stylists and suppliers can really flex their creative muscles.

They generate completely stunning, swoon-worthy imagery and I’ve loved working on a few over the years (have a browse through my Styling Gallery for a few) - but often they can turn people off, either because the styling is too BOLD, they haven’t considered using a wedding stylist and therefore can’t see how they would recreate the scene or they just think the look is unachievable for the amount of set-up time they have in their wedding venue.

If that’s you, my advice would be - hire a creative wedding stylist - just kidding, that would be too obvious 😉 

Zoom in on what appeals to you in the image, rather than thinking you have to copy it, detail for detail. Do you like the shape of the stationery, a banner used as a backdrop, the ceiling installation draped above the couple modelling?

The approach to planning your wedding vibe

Get analytical and start trying to see a pattern in the images and inspiration you’re collecting - I recommend doing this a couple. It’s all very well if you’re into bright Kusama-esque polka dots and neon signs but if you’re partner is into muted natural tones and tweed, you might have to meet in the middle somewhere!

NB. This is definitely where it pays to have the experience of a Wedding Stylist who can give you a coherent vision without it turning into a neon tweed mishmash from hell! If you want a design plan you can use to DIY your wedding decorations, have a look at my DESIGN MY WEDDING PACKAGES or look at my Other Wedding Styling services (LONDON 2025 WEDDINGS only) if you want the whole shebang.

OK, NOW you can hop on to Pinterest

Once you’ve mined all the different places and sources of inspiration, THIS is when starting a Pinterest board can be useful. Instead of spending hours typing in vague search and inspo terms, you can pop in all those references you’ve gathered quickly, or even upload your own phone photos (you can set them to private). TIP: Important your favourite images from Instagram onto your Pinterest board too so you’ve got them all in once place.