Choosing Your Wedding Colour Palette

Every wedding planning checklist asks for a colour palette fairly early on, usually before most couples have any idea what that actually means in practice. It ends up feeling like a bigger decision than it needs to be, partly because "palette" sounds like a design term borrowed from somewhere else, and partly because it genuinely does touch almost everything else: flowers, stationery, bridesmaid and groomsmen attire, table styling, even the venue you end up choosing.

• Primary colours: 1-2, carry the weight

• Accent colours: 1-2, used sparingly

• Summer light (Dec-Feb): Harsh, direct, suits bold tones

• Winter light (Jun-Aug): Soft, diffuse, suits jewel tones

At a glance

• Start from one anchor colour, then build 2-4 supporting colours around it, rather than choosing everything at once.

• Very pale pastels and pure white can wash out in bright sun; neon and fluorescent tones can cast colour onto skin up close.

• Your venue's fixed backdrop, brick, timber, garden greenery, changes how any palette actually reads on the day.

• Test real fabric and flower samples together in daylight before committing, screens render colour differently.

Where to actually start when choosing a palette

The easiest way to avoid staring at a blank moodboard is to start from one fixed point rather than trying to invent a whole scheme at once. That anchor can be almost anything: a colour you already love and want to wear, your venue's existing backdrop, or simply the general mood of the season you're marrying in. Once you have one colour locked in, everything else becomes a question of what supports it, which is a much easier problem than choosing four or five colours simultaneously from nothing.

Pinterest and wedding inspiration sites are useful for gathering general direction, but worth treating as a starting point rather than a literal blueprint. A palette photographed at someone else's venue, under someone else's light, won't necessarily translate directly to yours.

How many colours you actually need

Most workable palettes use fewer colours than couples initially expect: one or two primary colours that carry the bulk of the visual weight (often in the flowers, linens or a dominant attire colour), and one or two accent colours used more sparingly, in details like ribbon, stationery or smaller styling touches. Palettes that try to spread five or six colours evenly across the day tend to look busy and can make coordinating vendors, the florist, stationer and cake designer, genuinely harder, since everyone's working from a longer, less clear list of colours to match.

Basic colour relationships that work without a design background

You don't need any design training to use basic colour theory well. A complementary palette pairs colours from opposite sides of the colour wheel (a deep green with a warm terracotta, for instance) for genuine contrast and visual energy. An analogous palette uses colours that sit next to each other on the wheel (blush, dusty rose and burgundy) for a softer, more blended look. A monochromatic palette stays within different shades and tones of a single colour, which reads as elegant and cohesive but needs enough tonal variation, light, mid and dark shades of the same colour, to avoid looking flat in photos. None of these approaches is inherently better than the others; they simply produce different moods, and knowing the basic categories makes it much easier to describe what you want to a florist or stationer.

A workable palette usually comes down to a handful of straightforward decisions, made in a sensible order.

Which colours photograph well, and which cause problems

This is the part most colour-palette guides skip entirely, and it's genuinely useful to know before you commit. Very pale pastels and pure white, especially in bright midday sun, can wash out or blow out in photos, losing detail and texture that was clearly visible to the eye. Highly saturated neon or fluorescent tones, while striking in person, can reflect a colour cast onto nearby skin in close-up photos, a bright fuchsia or acid green sitting close to someone's face can genuinely shift the colour of their skin tone in the image. Deeper, more muted tones, forest green, terracotta, burgundy, dusty blue, tend to be more forgiving across a wide range of lighting conditions and hold their detail and richness in photos far more reliably than very bright or very pale extremes.

Worth knowing before you commit

None of this means avoiding bright colours entirely. It just means knowing that a saturated colour used as a small accent, a ribbon, a boutonniere detail, behaves very differently in photos to that same colour used as a large block, like an entire bridesmaid dress.

Matching your palette to your venue's fixed backdrop

A venue almost always brings its own colours into the mix whether you plan for it or not: exposed brick, dark timber beams, garden greenery, or a stone or concrete backdrop. A palette chosen entirely on screen, without reference to the actual venue, can clash or simply disappear against it. Warmer, earthier palettes tend to sit naturally against timber and brick, while cooler tones, dusty blues, sage greens, can feel slightly at odds with a warm-toned space unless deliberately used as contrast. Visiting the venue, or at minimum looking closely at real photos taken there, before finalising colours saves a lot of second-guessing once flowers and stationery are already ordered.

How the season affects which colours work

Light quality changes considerably across the year in New Zealand, and it genuinely affects how a palette reads on the day. Summer weddings, December to February, tend to have harsher, more direct overhead light for a large part of the day, which suits bolder, more saturated palettes that can hold their own against strong sun. Winter weddings, June to August, have lower, softer, more diffuse light for more of the day, which tends to flatter deeper jewel tones and richer, more muted colours particularly well, since the softer light brings out depth and texture rather than flattening it. This is a genuinely different consideration to which flowers are in season at a given time of year, it's about how the ambient light itself interacts with your chosen colours, whatever they're made of.

Testing your palette before you commit to it

Before finalising anything, it's worth gathering small physical samples, fabric swatches, ribbon, paint chips, actual flower stems if you can get them, and looking at them together in daylight rather than under artificial indoor lighting or on a screen. Screens render colour differently between devices, and a palette that looks cohesive on a laptop can look noticeably different once it's an actual dress, actual flowers and actual linen sitting next to each other in the room. A five-minute check with real samples, ideally at or near the venue itself, catches most mismatches well before they become an expensive problem to fix.

Settling on your colours?

Bring your palette along to an engagement shoot or planning chat, we're happy to talk through how it'll actually read in Auckland's light before you commit to it everywhere.