Lighting Design Tips for Corporate and Special Events

Lighting is the key to setting the right ambiance for your special event, it can immediately warm the room, evoke emotion or colour it to spectacular effect.

Often a clear plan and design process for lighting events and conferences is left out or though of during the setup of your event. This can lead to a number of things such as insufficient coverage, wrong choice of lights, underutilising of the equipment, which all adds up to how your event is perceived and functions.

As a lighting designer for events, theatre and broadcast we approach each design with a clear slate as each design is always going to have a unique set of requirements to suit the content.

We generally start by dividing our lighting requirements into two parts, function and creativity.

Firstly, our main priority for most events is to have lighting as an essential function in either lighting people and/or objects that need to be highlighted. This is your key lighting for stages, products or showcases or even walkways and exits.

These are the things that need to be lit so your audience can see them and do not really have a creative impact, but an essential function.

Our second, and more memorable priority is how we use lighting creatively to enhance the ambience and overall look of the room or stage.

This is where we add a bit of colour, patterns and movements to enhance your audience's experience.

Both the essential function and the creative look of the event lighting design are important and need to work in with each other to create a good overall result. Your event wont deliver your message very well if the audience can't see the presenters on stage or the video recording is too dark, and the impact or "wow factor" wont be there if you don't also creatively enhance the atmosphere.

Here are a few of our tips when thinking about lighting:

• Front lighting your stage is important to see your presenters faces, but back lighting is equally important to give dimension. This is essential when filming for presenters to stand out on stage and not blend into the background.


• A creative design does not need to use every colour available throughout the night. Think about selecting just 2 or 3 colours that work with the event theme or brand or create a colour pallet that evolves as the event progresses.


• Think outside the box. You don't need the latest and greatest technology to be creative. If your budget can not allow for moving lights or colour changing fixtures then there are still plenty, if not more creative opportunities with conventional lighting fixtures.


• Use lighting to highlight the features of the surroundings. Look for architectural features, walls, pillars, and ceilings to highlight instead of flooding the room directly with light. This not only creates depth to the venue, but is a softer light source and wont create harsh lighting shining in your eyes.