DIY Wedding Inspiration Boards

Though we’re past the holiday craze and have already rung in the new year, it is still the season of romance, proposals, and new beginnings. For all of you newly engaged brides and grooms, it is the time to bring your excitement to life and start planning the wedding of your dreams. Many brides have years of ideas stored in the back of their heads; pictures ripped out of magazines or pinned on Pinterest. A wedding is the most beautiful and elegant day of your life, and here at Bride & Blossom we believe that it should be nothing less than perfectly fashioned for you.

For brides looking to pull all their ideas together, we love to suggest a good old fashioned inspiration board.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, inspiration boards are a literal board or digital platform for you to collect images, fabrics, magazine articles, online catalogs and even personal pictures, in one place. This may include ideas for your theme, celebrity inspiration images, possible color schemes, décor that speaks to you, dresses of your dreams and more! Building an inspiration or “vision board” is an important step in the planning process because it helps you organize ideas and ensures your concepts are brought to life by you, your venue and your vendors. Today, we look at some of the most efficient and effective ways of building an inspiration board that will help you hone in on your wedding goals and communicate your ideas to vendors when the time comes.

 

 

The first thing to remember while putting your board together is it is not a shopping list! Yes, you may pull pictures of items which you will later purchase, but this is ultimately an exercise in gathering ideas freely to later curate into a fresh and organic look that is personalized just for you.

Here are a few of the first steps to get you started:

Step 1. Find a platform to create your board.

Step 2. Decide what the board will consist of.

Step 3. Find images, materials and color schemes that bring your vision to life.

Step 4. Organize, add and remove until the board flows exactly how you would like.

Step 5. Work with vendors, bridal party and your venue to make your hard work and vision a reality!

You might prefer to create one board or break it up into categories such as reception, ceremony, flowers and dresses. This makes it super convenient to relate back to and work directly with the products in question. Adding color swatches, flower types, and sample pictures of weddings at your desired venue makes for a much easier first meeting with your vendors. Photoshop is a great tool to use as you can create, cut, crop and blend clips together to have a full image in front of you. This is also a great tool as you can print them out for physical copies, or send them as documents to your florist, venue and other vendors in order to ensure that everyone has the same mental image and is prepared to work towards the same aesthetic. We find this to be a particularly useful method because you can swap images as your change your mind, save old boards and have fun creating and mixing up themes, styles, colors and ideas!

 

 

For you old fashioned, DIY brides out there, you may prefer to pull images from magazines or catalogs and pin them on a cork board, blank wall, poster, or in a binder. This method is fun in that it allows you to pull from all sorts of sources. Mix and match, tape and pin until you have created the complete collage for you. This can include images from bridal magazines, recipes for cocktails, pieces of fabric, handwritten notes, whatever you want! Some people work better when they can feel the fabric of their bridesmaid dresses or physically hold color swatches next to each other to really envision their wedding reception or ceremony. This is a fun and creative way to design anything from your centerpieces to your invitations, plus it’s something you will always have to remember the beautiful characteristics you first dreamed of and then made a reality.

 

 

If you’re tech-savvy and eager to work fast and furiously, there are several options for online platforms to help facilitate your digital board.

 

Pinterest

Pinterest is a media platform that allows you to search and save – or “pin” – images, videos, DIY ideas, recipes, etc. that link directly back to their original source. When you see an image you like, you simply click “Pin it!” and that image is added to your personal compilation or “pin board.”

One of the biggest advantages of Pinterest is that images are catalogued by keywords and descriptive tags, allowing you to search for highly specific images. A search for “Bohemian wedding flowers,” for example, could be followed by a search for “Bohemian wedding flowers purple bridal bouquet.”

On your own Pinterest profile, you can create a private folder that allows you to mix and match and save images to refer back to later. Pinterest is a great tool for people who need general inspiration or want ideas to add to their existing plans. It’s helpful, creative and fun (and addictive!) to browse past weddings, staged shoots, historical images, and magazine articles under one URL. Compile your favorites and then make those fabulous ideas your own.

 

SampleBoard

SampleBoard is a fantastic tool that is popular in the interior design and wedding industries. It allows you to create, expand, and share vision boards by searching the web or uploading external images, and organizing them into an inspiration board. Its intuitive, drag & drop design makes it a fast, sleek, and user-friendly option for brides and designers alike.

 

Styleboard (by The Dessy Group)

This online tool is part of The Dessy Group. The Dessy Group is primarily a wedding retailer, but they also provide a great vision board builder, Styleboard, on their website. Styleboard provides a blank slate and many add-in features such as an Instagram search within the app, as well as pictures from a variety of categories like food & beverage, décor, cakes and jewelry.

 

 

Whichever method you choose, inspiration boards are a great way to get your creative juices flowing and help you get motivated to plan your big day. We hope that while creating your inspiration boards you not only feel inspired to get down to planning every last detail, but you also have fun, enjoy looking at spectacular weddings and piece by piece, build your dream wedding before your very eyes.