1 Location, Location, Location
The first place to show off your personality is with your venue selection. There is something out there for everybody. If you are adventurous and love to travel, outdoorsy, indoorsy, preppy, formal, love to party, love crowds, hate crowds, like to read, are modern, are traditional, are quirky, or anything else you might be, there is a venue or a destination for you. Choose what feels most like you and begin to formulate the details from there.
2 A Theme to Tell Your Story
Without overdoing it to the point of nausea, your entire wedding event should follow some sort of theme. Is your fiancé from a tropical island? Bring it to you! Are you the girl who ALWAYS wears blue and everyone knows that about your personality? Use blue in your color palette! Do you both have quirky personalities and go thrift shopping? Start with an understated vintage theme!
3 Memorable Motifs
Once you have your theme, choose some motifs to make things even more personal. Say you’re having a modern, geometric theme, but you also love birds. Incorporate unique geometric bird shapes into your wedding! They can be designed by a graphic designer and used on your stationery and in other areas at the wedding. Or if you are having a preppy yet formal theme, bow ties can be your motif. Create bow ties out of napkins at each place setting, incorporate a cute bow tie detail on your invitations, put one on your cake, etc.
4 Leave Your Mark with a Monogram
Create a wedding monogram. Nobody else will have your monogram because it will speak to your theme, motif, colors, and style!
5 Hashtag Genius
Create a wedding hashtag! Now your wedding photos are searchable on social media, and everything from that hashtag will be on your own special photo feed. But be sure to choose something unique, AKA not #MintToBe, since that will have many more results than only your wedding. Create signage (incorporating your theme/motif!) that shows the hashtag at your wedding so that people can post photos using the hashtag in real time. Place your signage on your bar(s), at the entrance to your ceremony and/or reception, in the bathrooms (write it on the mirror in dry-erase marker!), put it at the bottom of the wedding program or wedding menu, and so on.
6 Mood Lighting
The quickest way to make your venue feel different than what it looked like when you were there for a friend’s wedding last month is to create a lighting scheme. Try a little uplighting in your colors, add pinspots to your centerpieces, add chandeliers, overdose your tables on candles, etc. Creating a lighting scheme will bring your whole event together and make the venue feel like it’s yours.
7 Fave Foods
Serve food that you want to eat! Most venues will work with you on special requests, fun ideas, or flavors that you like. You can go extra adventurous on the hors d’oeuvres to set the tone for the culinary experience the guests will have.
8 Delectable Desserts
In keeping with the food theme, consider a dessert station. Cake isn’t for everybody. If you never eat cake or you hate frosting, consider providing an alternate dessert that is more you. Maybe you love pecan pie. Slice it up and serve it to your guests with a dollop of fresh whipped cream. Or try an ice cream station (the bride and groom mix their special flavor instead of cutting a cake), a beautifully displayed assortment of bite-sized desserts, a table of colorful macarons, in the fall you can roast s’mores (yes you can indoors!) or even consider having some kind of dessert food truck arrive to your wedding for a fun surprise.
9 Wedding Favors
We always say when it comes to wedding favors, if something doesn’t feel uniquely personal to you, if it doesn’t excite you, don’t even do them! Nobody will remember or care about the weird container of mints that you gave them, but they will remember how your wedding made them feel. If you have an idea for a favor that is very personal to you and says something about you and the wedding that they attended, then you have a winning combination!
10 Think Big Picture
Overall: don’t overdo any one part. The whole wedding should be cohesive without anything feeling forced or tacky!
Written by Jackie Tucker
