Special events and celebrations such as birthday parties, bridal/baby showers, and weddings require a decent amount of planning – and one of the best things you can do to help streamline the planning process is to create an inspiration board. This will help you visualize what the party will look like and make decisions on what elements work well together and within your overall theme.
You can create inspiration boards a few different ways, but digital boards are always a smart option because of their extreme flexibility – not to mention the fact that there are so many inspirational photos and products to choose from online.
If you don’t have training in a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop, not to worry! There’s a great solution out there called Polyvore that enables anyone to create virtual inspiration boards just like the Pretty in Pink Bridal Shower and Daisy Baby Shower boards pictured above.
Polyvore is a free web-based application for mixing and matching images from anywhere on the web. It lets you create sets composed of individual images using a surprisingly easy-to-use drag and drop editor. Here’s a little more info on how it works.
Next to the boards (or "sets") that you create – Polyvore also lists the individual photos used within the set and their sourcing info, which is one of my favorite features. Sometimes I get so caught up in my search for inspiration that I’ll forget where I first found the product or photo, but Polyvore automatically saves that info for you, which makes life so much easier!
Pictured above: Modern Bride 5, Tickled Pink
The bulk of the boards on Polyvore
right now seem to be fashion-related, but this tool works just as well
for parties and weddings, and there already seems to be a lot of
activity in the wedding category in particular. A few examples are
pictured within this post – and you can click here to visit polyvore and start exploring more ideas or creating new themes of your own!
Did someone jump right into my head and grab all the ideas I have for my daughters 1st? Only not pink, purple! I bought a few things so far, one of them being paper lanterns (they are hot this year,huh?) the other thing being this little pinwheels that are purple… TOO CUTE!!!!!! I really can not wait
What a wonderful application! I actually found Polyvore a few months ago, but you’ve inspired me to investigate it a bit more! Thanks!
I love polyvore. It is a great design tool. Great blog!-jen:)
Thanks for this article…my friend is getting married and has asked to help her with some ideas. We live a great distance apart so this will be an easy way for me to come up with some ideas and share with her…if I can figure it out!
Excellent resource! Thanks a ton.
Love the two boards your created…how fun. I just signed up for Weddingwire a couple days ago and found a great tool to make an inspiration board there as well
here is the link: http://www.weddingwire.com/wedding-planning/wedding-inspiration-boards.html
This HAS made my day!!! Seriously been wanting to be able to create an inspiration board for a very long time and now I think I can do it!! Thank you so much for sharing. I’ve signed up and am collecting some pictures for my first board. Yay.
Wow– this is a wonderful application. I’ll have to try it out!
I love Polyvore! I had never though of using it for party planning though – thank you for the idea!
Love!!! Awesome!!!
I *CAN NOT* tell you how happy I am that I ran across your post: this is EXACTLY what I was looking for!!! I love the inspiration board concept, but my major Con was the lack of **getting back** to the inspirations shown!
((HUGS)) Thank you!!