When people think about color at an event, they might picture flowers, table linen, a piece of branding or a carefully coordinated palette on a mood board. For entrepreneur and longtime event producer Joe Blackman MBE, color starts somewhere much more fundamental, with the environment itself and the emotional experience it needs to create.
“You start by looking at your canvas, which is the room or the space,” Blackman says. “You’re also starting with your conditions, whether it’s daytime or whether it’s an evening event, because that completely changes what you can do with color.”
During the day, designers inevitably have to work with the world around them. Natural light, architecture, existing surfaces and materials all bring colors of their own. At night, there is far more control.
“In an evening event, you have much more ability to control the color palette because really lighting is the key,” he says.
That relationship between light and color fascinated Blackman from childhood, long before it became part of his professional life.
Discovering Color From the Lighting Box
Blackman grew up around a local arts center in Wales where his mother worked, and some of his earliest memories of live production are not actually of what was happening on stage. He was fascinated by the people controlling what the audience could see.
“I’d always be amazed when I saw shows and performances by how much the lighting affected me,” he recalls. “I used to sit as a little boy by the lighting box looking up at the guys who were working in it.”
On one occasion, a lighting technician invited him inside.
“I remember being in this production box looking at the stage from the lighting console, and it just amazed me how much control the lighting designers had over the atmosphere and ambience of the event.”
The fascination stayed with him. When Blackman first went to university, he studied stage management, specializing particularly in technical production and lighting design for live events. It gave him a technical starting point for thinking about color that went beyond simply choosing what looked attractive. Light could create color, alter it, intensify it and sometimes completely change the way a space was perceived.
Perhaps the clearest demonstration comes when there is no light at all.
“You can be in an event in a completely black room with hundreds or thousands of people in the audience and no light,” he says. “You realize the power then of even just one light, one follow spot, and how you slowly introduce color to a completely dark room.”
The emotional effect can be enormous.
“It can be so immensely powerful, emotive and evocative to the senses in terms of how you’re feeling about what you’re experiencing, whether that’s a concert, a theatrical show or a live event.”
The same principle is at work well beyond entertainment. Interior designers use lighting to create warmth, intimacy, energy and calm in homes, restaurants and hotels. Live events simply give designers an opportunity to use those effects on a much bigger and often more dramatic scale.
“In domestic lighting design, people use lighting in a very similar way to create moods and environments as we do in live events,” Blackman says. “It just tends to be a lot more dramatic.”
Color Doesn’t Exist in Isolation
Before deciding what colors to introduce into an event, Blackman looks at what is already going to be there.
“You look at objects, you look at people and who’s on stage, and you look at the colors and tones of whatever it is you’re looking to light,” he says. “Whether that’s a building, whether that’s a person, whether that’s a stage, a site or a room, you definitely look at what is going to be there in the space. Then you look at how you’re going to complement that.”
It is one reason the traditional color wheel remains useful even in an age of programmable LEDs and almost limitless digital palettes. Complementary colors sit opposite one another and can create powerful contrast. Analogous colors sit alongside one another and tend to produce greater visual harmony. Triadic schemes use three evenly spaced points around the wheel, giving contrast while retaining a degree of balance.
These are not rules that have to be followed rigidly. They are simply useful ways of understanding how colors relate to one another.
“Having a basic understanding of what colors work together is important,” Blackman says. “That’s where we draw people back to some of those classic rules with the color wheel, colors that sit next to each other, colors opposite each other, and understanding what colors complement each other.”
The same thinking applies when the subject is a person rather than a room. Blackman points to a personal stylist he has mentored through The King’s Trust whose approach particularly interested him. Her work places a strong emphasis on finding vivid colors that complement an individual’s natural coloring and bring their skin tone to life.
The disciplines are quite different, but the underlying principle is much the same. A color does not exist on its own. What matters is what happens when it sits beside a particular face, material, building, flower, fabric or another color.
Designing Emotion Rather Than Decoration
There is also the emotional effect of color, much of which we respond to without consciously thinking about it.
“We all as humans associate, without even realizing it, certain colors with certain moods,” Blackman says. “A mid pale blue is often associated with calmness or maybe even sadness, something more melancholy. Red tends to be more fiery and lively and vibrant.”
Those associations have long made color an important part of storytelling. A theatrical lighting designer might deliberately change the emotional temperature of a scene. At an event, the objective may be different, but the same principles can influence how a room feels as guests move through it.
“I think the decision comes from the type of event you’re producing and also the special moment you’re trying to create,” Blackman says.
That does not mean an event has to maintain exactly the same visual identity from beginning to end. Arrival might call for relatively static, restrained lighting because the design does not need to dominate the experience. Later, the same room might become warmer, darker, more intimate or considerably more energetic.
Sometimes that progression happens so gradually that guests barely notice it.
“You can make a quick, sudden change to light and it can be very obvious,” Blackman says. “Whereas subtle changes to lighting over the period of a couple of hours, taking the brightness even just down rather than changing the color itself, can make a massive difference to the atmosphere.”
Color in an event is therefore not just about deciding on a palette at the beginning. It can evolve throughout the evening as the atmosphere and purpose of the event change.
The Same Color Is Never Quite the Same Color
One of the complications of designing with color is that it rarely behaves exactly as expected. Something selected from a sample or screen can look surprisingly different once it is placed into a real environment.
“I don’t think we should think about this just as lighting,” Blackman says. “We’re using things such as texture. You can have a very flat tablecloth, you can have something more textured. The light bounces off that differently, it gives different shadow, and shadow itself affects color.”
Anyone who has painted a room has probably seen a version of this.
“If you put paint on two different walls that are adjacent to each other where there’s a window, the color can look extremely different just based on the way the natural light is flowing around the space,” he says.
At an event, there are many more variables. Velvet absorbs and reflects light differently from satin. Glass behaves differently from linen. Flowers create shadows and tonal variation that a printed color sample cannot reproduce. Metallic surfaces pick up reflections from other parts of the room. Then the environment changes again as daylight fades.
For an event designer, choosing the right color in isolation only gets you so far. What really matters is how that color behaves in the space, on the material being used, under the available light and at the time the event is actually taking place.
When Color Gets the Mood Wrong
The problem becomes particularly noticeable when the emotional message of a color scheme contradicts the purpose of the event.
Blackman remembers attending a private event where extensive use of cool blue lighting created exactly that problem.
“They were trying to create a warmth in this private event, where it felt welcoming,” he says. “But because it was so cold and almost clinical or surgical, you could really feel how that negatively impacted the overall atmosphere.”
It was not necessarily something guests would consciously have identified as a lighting problem.
“People just didn’t seem like they were as comfortable.”
Compare that with one of the oldest forms of event lighting, a candle.
“The beautiful warmth of candlelight, that incandescent, warm amber, has something almost instinctively comforting about it.”
But even there, the color itself is only part of what we respond to. A candle flickers.
“The movement makes a difference,” Blackman says. “The flicker of candlelight and that warm amber isn’t flat. It has texture because of the movement.”
Movement introduces another possibility into color design. Modern lighting systems can sweep color through a room or change intensity almost imperceptibly. On stage, performers themselves can physically carry color through a space. Blackman gives the example of dancers working with brightly colored silks, where the fabric produces constantly changing shapes as it moves.
Color does not have to sit still.
Designing for the Eye and the Camera
Modern event designers also have another audience to consider, the camera. Social media has changed the way events are photographed, shared and, increasingly, designed.
“Neon is back,” Blackman says. “People love neon signs because they give these bright, bold colors that work for photos.”
Venues have responded to that appetite.
“It’s interesting to see how venues have started to design themselves with an influencer in mind, with specific areas that are set up for that classic social media shot.”
But designing for a camera introduces a complication Blackman already knew from television and stage production. The camera does not necessarily see what the human eye sees.
“Color can look totally different on camera than it does in real life,” he says. “There’s a real tension between designing color for what you want people to see on a screen and designing for the live audience that may be there.”
Exposure, white balance, display settings and the characteristics of different cameras can all change the final image. An event can look extraordinary on Instagram while feeling strangely uncomfortable when you are actually standing in the room. Equally, subtle lighting that creates a beautiful atmosphere for guests might not photograph in quite the same way.
The challenge is to understand both audiences without allowing the photograph to become more important than the experience itself.
Five Rules for Using Color in Live Events
For anyone thinking about color in an event of their own, Blackman’s experience points to five useful principles.
1. Understand which colors naturally work together.
Learn the fundamentals of the color wheel. Complementary, analogous and triadic relationships provide a useful starting point, even if the final design eventually breaks some of those conventions.
2. Start with the environment, not the swatch.
Look at the architecture, natural light, existing materials, people and surroundings before choosing a palette. The space already contains color before anything new is brought into it.
3. Decide how you want people to feel.
Color should suit the emotional purpose of the event. A palette that works beautifully for an energetic performance could feel completely wrong at an intimate dinner, even if both look attractive in isolation.
4. Remember that color changes.
Light intensity, texture, shadow, movement and time of day can dramatically alter the way a color appears. Where possible, important choices should be tested in the actual environment rather than judged entirely from samples.
5. Design for the experience before the photograph.
Think about how colors will appear on camera, particularly for events intended for television or social media, but do not allow the screen to become more important than the people actually standing in the room.
Color as an Emotional Journey
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Blackman’s approach is that he does not believe an event necessarily needs a single hero color.
“I think it’s the relationship between colors and the relationship between the emotion you’re trying to create in the journey you’re trying to take people on,” he says.
That idea of a journey matters because guests do not experience an event as a mood board. They experience it over time. They arrive, explore, interact, eat, watch, listen, celebrate and eventually leave, and the atmosphere needed at each of those moments can be quite different.
Color can change with them. It might begin restrained and architectural, become warmer as people settle into dinner and then change dramatically when entertainment begins. The physical room has not moved, but it can feel like a completely different place.
That is where color stops being simply decorative. It becomes one of the less obvious ways of shaping an experience, directing attention, changing the energy of a room, creating intimacy or producing spectacle, often without the people experiencing it consciously understanding why the atmosphere has changed.
Blackman’s childhood fascination with the lighting box makes sense in that context. Sitting behind a console, he could see something the audience could not. He could see how deliberately their perception of the room was being constructed.
Decades later, the technology has changed enormously, but the principle behind it has not. The most effective use of color is not necessarily the palette people notice most. It is the one that feels right for the space, the moment and the people in it.