At the end of last year, we hosted a community gathering—an intimate soirée set against a fittingly autumnal backdrop. To bring the seasonal setting to life, we partnered with, a friend of Visualist and founder of fourteen a.m., Winnie Tam. To embark on our collaborative project, we needed a space to house our inspiration, develop our concept, and seamlessly collaborate—naturally, we used Visualist.
A shared space to develop ideas
“We want to transform the space by turning foraged natural materials into art” - Winnie Tam
Given the seasonal timing and her personal appreciation for nature, Winnie suggested that we let Autumn's natural beauty inform our design direction—deep red hues with sparks of yellow, intricately tangled branches and delicate but robust autumn bloomers. The only place to find items of such beauty is in nature itself, and so our decor was to be built entirely from foraged natural materials.
We named our event, "The Art of Gathering"—a title that spoke to the creative concept as well as the physical act of bringing together our creative community.
Choosing a plot
To manage the project, we needed a "control room". We built a hub in Visualist as an easily navigable space to store our growing ideas.
Hunting and gathering
Winnie and our creative team set about foraging for inspiration to fill our hub. Firstly, we looked for images that broadly communicated our desired aesthetic and sparked imagination—each image was saved to our Visualist library. The library was then combed for top picks and these were clipped to the board "evening Inspiration".
We then repeated this process with boards dedicated to food styling and invitation design. We also created boards to detail more logistical aspects of the project such as the existing furniture within the office and the assets of our brand partners—this systematic and logical organisation of our ideas was key to the success of our event.
A pop of colour
Winnie used the gathered imagery to craft our colour palette for the event. Our colour palette needed to be recognisably autumnal, without being too conventional.
Winnie started with an auto-generated colour palette taken from an image in the Art of Gathering inspo board, she then used Visualist's colour palette editor to explore hues, tints and shades. The resulting colour palette felt reminiscent of autumn but with a distinctly customised stamp—exactly what we wanted.
Watering the seeds
Visualist is not just a space to store and share inspiration, it is also a space to collaborate; to discuss and refine every detail of a project. The key to a successful collaboration is clear communication, we tackled this with stickies. Leaving stickies on our visual references ensured all opinions were heard but also kept our conversations focused and concise.
When working with visual references, it is useful to pinpoint specific elements of an image such as colour, texture or subject to ensure everyone is clear on the project the direction is heading. Our method of stickie correspondence meant fewer revisions were required to the final design—given our limited time scale, this efficiency was key.
A platform to facilitate collaboration
Establishing a clear vision amongst ourselves was one thing, but in order for the event to come together we needed to clearly and efficiently communicate that to our brand collaborators. We bookmarked the websites of homeware and lifestyle brands that we felt matched our brand aesthetic in our Art of Gathering Hub, then set about proposing a collaboration with them. In our initial outreach, we attached a set to convey the mood, colour scheme and delicateness that we wanted to emulate at our event—after all, a moodboard speaks a thousand words.
The best part? Sets made in Visualist can be shared directly with just one click—recipients don't need a Visualist account, which meant there was no barrier to viewing—an important factor in the high success rate of our outreach. Here is what we shared...
Our set was coherent and clearly communicated our vision, which made the rest of the process simple and efficient—our brand partners required very little help with shortlisting products they felt were suitable for our event.
A home from concept to completion
Winnie married all the elements of her design in a set in Visualist. The infinite canvas mimicked a table on which she could lay out all her tablescape ideas and play with potential arrangements. Here, Winnie could illustrate exactly how she envisioned each aspect of the design entwining and we began to see the vision come to life. Winnie's final sets detailed furniture layout, the function of each space and the particulars of the decor—down to the finest of details—which were then shared with the entire Visualist team ahead of the big day. The detailed preparation and clear references meant that when that the set-up ran as a fine-tuned operation. Every box checked, everything in order—not a leaf out of place!
Et voila! A beautiful event brought to life in Visualist!
