Lighting and sound are crucial to a comfortable and welcoming environment. After reading this you will know how to choose a venue with good ambient lighting and minimal reverberations so people in your events are only picking up the good vibrations

📸 Props

Adverts lingering around either in real life or in our photography are ugly.

• Neon signs

• Branded signs

• Warning signs about drugs or thieves

• Screens (switch them off)

• Fire extinguishers

Solution? Ask the venue if you could take down signs and switch off screens during the event (and we’ll put them back up after). As an example in this photo above the wood pannelling area will look great without the signs.

💡Lighting

Use venues with a warm ambient surround-lighting, so that participants feel relaxed, calm and sociable which encourages them to stay put for longer.

🚫 Fluorescent tube lighting, flashy disco lights or brightly coloured lights are rubbish

🧡 Warm (orangey)- Like in romantic movies. Sunlight at sunrise, tungsten lights, candles, oil lamps and incandescent bulbs give a warm relaxing light.

💙 Cool (white or bluish) - Like in horror movies. Hospital or factory lighting, halogen lamps or fluorescent lamps give a cold unwelcoming light; high on the Kelvin scale 👇

Mood Impact (deep dive)

When you see a blinking fluorescent light at night why does it give you the creeps? Did you know people are more optimistic about the stock market on sunny days? Our mood every day is greatly effected by light, far more than we realise. Many big businesses understand this and use lighting to influence their customer’s mood. Generally, if you want people to move quickly and not hang about then cold, high Kelvin lighting is used. Ever notice that McDonalds have bright lighting around the service area? Yup, give us your money, eat your food and get out!

For this same reason fancy restaurants will put on warm lighting to help customers feel relaxed (even when the bill arrives), and cabin crew on long-haul flights will switch from blue to orange cabin lighting when they want you to fall asleep so they can eat.

Bad lighting in a venue will break your event. When venues use a certain type of lighting in the wrong way it results in an ugly appearance and uncomfortable atmosphere. For example, using bright spotlights is great for illuminating art, or fixing a laptop, but hanging them from a ceiling in an otherwise dark bar can cause unflattering facial shadows. Used correctly all-round warm ambient lighting can have a very positive effect on how long you want to stay somewhere.

🌅 Good Vibrations

Reverberations are echoes that form unwanted sounds that interfere with the sounds we want to focus on. These can be chairs scraping, glasses clinking, nearby traffic, or the hum of machinery. In a venue, noise can arise from outdoors, adjoining rooms or hallways. A good HFE (Hearing Friendly Environment) has very few reverberations.

If you ever tried holding a conversation in a concrete stairwell, you know that reverberations make it difficult to understand each other. Here's why: Stairwells have lots of hard, flat surfaces that reflect, rather than absorb sound. Sound waves bounce wildly in all directions like a steel ball flying around a pinball machine. Since the surfaces are not absorbing the sounds, the sounds take much longer to decay and die out. These reflected sounds arrive at our ears at multiple times after we hear the direct sound

Reverberations combine and increase the overall volume. Our brain can filter out a lot of noise, but this takes mental energy and is exhausting.This adds to the mental fatigue experienced when speaking and listening to languages that are not one's native tongue

How to choose a HFE venue?

• Floors

  • Avoid Porcelain, ceramic or ‘floating wood’

  • Choose carpets, cork, hard wood, stone or concrete are great for a HFE.

• Walls

  • Avoid metal, hollow concrete or perfectly flat walls

  • Choose brick, wood, stone, or walls with lots of decoration such as pictures

• Ceilings

  • Avoid low ceilings, metal or perfectly flat surfaces.

  • Choose high ceilings, brick, wood, stone

• Furniture

  • Wooden tables, heavy curtains, bookshelves, pictures on the walls, plants etc

• Test

  • Drop a coin. If you cannot hear the coin hit the floor it’s probably a HFE!

Now what?

Next up, it’s time to Make a Flag Order

Or Go Back

👈 Events Operations Manual