An interview with wedding designer Joy Thigpen, Part 2

I hope you all enjoyed Part 1 of Joy's interview! She is so intuitive and truly knows how to capture the spirit of her brides through her creative direction and styling. And if you want more of Joy, her blog is a fabulous way to continue seeing her inspiring collages of images and she also gets a little personal, and of course her work. (We are very fond of this post and this post.)Is it too early to identify the most popular wedding trends of 2013? Eh, I try to avoid the whole trend thing overall. But if I had to, I'd say the 20s thing will just continue to pick up steam and that overall we'll start seeing a return to more classic weddings.Besides hiring the designer, what is the number one most important part of planning a wedding?I'd say the most important part of planning a wedding (way more important than hiring the designer) is knowing your priorities--what's most important to you? Everyone is different. As long as you can identify the things that are most important to you, you and everyone you hire will be able to work toward those goals and be able to be successful.In your experience how involved are grooms? Ha, hmmm...usually not so much. :)Do you have a favorite wedding you have featured or designed?Always the next one. :)Having attended probably hundreds of weddings, how do you remain inspired? I actually don't look at wedding stuff nearly as much as non-wedding stuff. I stay inspired by the non-wedding world. I run ideas by Emily (Once Wed) who knows everything happening in the wedding world and she lets me know if its been done yet or not.What wedding resources for brides would you recommend? I think Pinterest is a great gateway to help brides get a feel for what they like and which resources and blogs will be best for them.Can you walk us through the process of one of your full service weddings?Sure! I always like to start with an intensive Creative Session where I spend the first half getting to know them and pulling out all their fragmented dreams of how they want their wedding to be; the second half is spent brainstorming together and developing the fragments into a fairly complete, though still rough draft of the wedding. By the end of that Creative Session we have a pretty good idea of where we're going. The rest of the months in between are spent filling in every detail, finding the best team for the job, and often creating most everything from scratch. The week of the wedding I show up with my team, set everything up, and then walk through the day with the bride and photographer making sure everything is looking and feeling its best.How do you help your bride discover her something lovely? I listen to her. Ask her questions. I just point it out to her (and maybe build on it) as it comes out.