Colour Focus

Choosing a colour scheme for your wedding or party isn’t always as easy as it sounds. The way a particular colour is used for one celebration can give rise to a completely different atmosphere compared to another, so it is important to use your chosen palette in the right way. Finding ways of incorporating your chosen colours into your event isn’t always straightforward, though, especially if you struggle to visualise how your celebration will ultimately look.

As creative wedding and event planners, we love the challenge of putting together novel colour palettes and finding unusual ways of incorporating colour into our clients’ celebration designs. Therefore, we have decided to run a regular “Colour Focus” series on the blog, where we take a single shade and offer our ideas for ways in which this colour can be used for any kind of celebration – whether it be a formal wedding, fun birthday party or intimate baby shower.

For our first post in this series we’ve chosen the classic colour of love to coincide with Valentine’s Day. Red is often used to create a striking impact at parties, or for corporate events where companies are looking to make a strong statement whilst avoiding traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ colours. Although it was once a popular colour choice for weddings, these days it often dismissed by brides who are fearful of their wedding feeling too old fashioned or heavy on the eye.

Being such a bold colour, red isn’t necessarily the easiest of shades to work with or combine with other tones. However, by pairing it with less obvious colour choices and giving careful thought to the way it is used, using red as a base tone can make for some beautiful, striking and up-to-date designs, both for weddings and other celebratory occasions.

Red and Black

Pairing red with black is a great option for a bold and contemporary design. It is brilliant for parties, but can work just as well for a wedding celebration. Using red in blocks of solid colour, such as for floral arrangements, helps to create a strong visual impact and breaks up the monochromatic undertones.

Using black and red extensively, such as for furnishings and tableware, can work particularly well for themed and highly stylised parties, but for most brides would feel too heavy for their wedding. However, toning down the use of these shades and incorporating ‘punches’ of colour throughout the design, such as by offering red cocktails, using red napkins on tables or red cushions for lounge areas, is the perfect way of creating a contemporary, but still sufficiently romantic, look.

Red and Aqua

This is a really fun colour palette, and works brilliantly for less formal or contemporary styles. Whilst this may not be the most obvious colour pairing, incorporating the light aqua shade helps break the heaviness of the red and adds a lighthearted dimension to the design. These colours lend themselves particularly well to design traits such as geometric or zig-zag patterns, ribbon-based chair decorations or backdrops, small floral arrangements and coloured tableware.

Red, Pink and Peach

This beautiful colour palette has a soft, romantic feel, and is perfect for elegant summer weddings and parties. Using shades of red ranging from deep burgundy to delicate pink offers a deep tonal design, whilst adding the soft peach helps to lighten the overall feel.

We love the idea of using long dining tables adorned with flowers, whether these be small, mismatched vases or low and full arrangements. Using white linen and simple tableware allow the colours within the flowers and stationery to really stand out, thus creating a simple, elegant and visually eye-catching design. An ombre cake or macaroon tower design further accentuates the breadth of the colour palette, and makes for a striking focal piece that is bang on trend.

So, will you be using red in your event design? We’d love to know about your colour palette and design ideas!

Happy Planning!