Design & Florals
Jes Gordon: The Camera Gets an Easier Night Than the Guest
The camera gets a much easier night than the guest does. It never waits at the bar or smells the lilies. If it only photographs well, it isn't finished.
Jes Gordon’s event work has been described as eclectic, purposeful and genuinely interested in emotional response beyond the purely visual. Her current company, properFUN, continues in full-service event production and design.
That makes her useful for a question I keep coming back to: what’s the actual difference between a beautiful event and a beautiful photograph of an event?
The camera gets a much easier night than the guest does
A photograph doesn’t care whether the music was too loud. It doesn’t wait at the bar. It can’t tell you the room smelled overwhelmingly of lilies five minutes before dinner. It has no opinion about the chair.
Guests absolutely do.
A multisensory design approach forces the concept out of the image file and into the body. Texture, sound, scent, temperature, food and movement all become part of what the event actually is. I agree with that completely, as long as the senses are coordinated rather than treated as extra places to decorate.
Emotion is a design objective, but it needs an actual mechanism
Make it emotional is not a plan. The useful question is always what actually produces the feeling.
Intimacy might require lower light and closer seating. Anticipation may need a compressed entry before a larger reveal. Calm can depend on eliminating queues far more than choosing pale flowers.
I like Gordon’s emphasis on purpose because it gives every theatrical choice something real to answer for.
Design for the person standing there, not the camera
For each major moment, write the intended feeling, then list the physical conditions required to actually support it. If the plan says warm and intimate while the floor plan says guests twelve feet apart under white uplights, I believe the floor plan. Design the experience guests will actually inhabit, not the one on the moodboard.
See current work: properFUN
Read more: Harper’s Bazaar’s profile of leading event designers
Meet the 20 designers shaping this field guide · The New Rules of Event Design · The Hospitality School of Event Design
Atmosphere OS · Theme Atelier
Turn the mood into something a florist can quote.
Theme Atelier builds palette, materials, lighting and spatial mood into one system, then writes it in language a vendor can price. Every number it produces comes from a published rule, and the rulebook names the judgments it deliberately refuses to call rules.
Free to use, local-first in your browser, and there is no account until you ask for one.
Field notes and corrections
When a number here turns out to be wrong, you hear about it.
Three things arrive and nothing else. The new field note — bar rates, cover widths, service clearances, the arithmetic worked through on one real evening. A line when a World opens, because a night only goes up once it can actually be thrown. And a correction whenever a rule in the published rulebook changes, or a number the tools rely on turns out to have been wrong. There is no weekly slot, because there is nothing weekly to put in it.
One email per field note or opening, plus corrections when a published figure moves. Unsubscribe from any of them.
Continue through the system
Pretty is still not a plan.
A party gets planned in roughly this order. Pick the chapter where your next problem lives.
What you have to decide next
One decision constrains the next. This is the order they actually happen in.
More in this chapter
See the complete five-chapter Event Design Intelligence map →