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Gather

About

A studio that turned its own method into software

Gather began as a planning practice. The workspace in this template is the tool that practice would have wanted — a single place where the guest list, the money and the schedule stay in agreement.

The story

Every event runs on three numbers: how many people are coming, how much has been committed, and what happens when. Most planning tools handle one of them well and leave the other two to a spreadsheet that nobody wants to open on the morning of the day.

Gather treats those three as one model. Change an RSVP and the catering figure moves. Remove a vendor and the budget adjusts. Complete a task and the dashboard progress follows. There is no separate summary to fall out of date, because there is no separate summary.

The public side of the product — venues, vendors, packages — exists for the same reason. The decisions made while browsing are the decisions the planner then has to hold.

Planning principles

  1. 01Fix the venue and the date before anything else is decided.
  2. 02Treat the guest list as the budget, because it is.
  3. 03Separate committed money from paid money, always.
  4. 04Leave the last six weeks deliberately underplanned.
  5. 05Give one named person the run sheet on the day.
  6. 06Print the timeline. Paper does not lose signal.

How we think about it

  • One model, many views

    Guests, vendors, budget, timeline and tasks are five readings of the same event. Duplicating them is how planning tools start lying.

  • Constraints, stated early

    Capacity, budget and dates are limits. Software should say so at the moment of the decision, not in a report afterwards.

  • Quiet by default

    A planning tool is used under pressure. It should be legible at a glance, in daylight, on a phone, by someone who has not slept.

  • Nothing decorative that is not useful

    Typography, rules and whitespace do the work. There is no animation here that exists only to be noticed.

A small studio

Four people, fictional, created to demonstrate this template.

  • Meera Iyengar

    Founder & lead planner

    Runs the weddings. Believes the run sheet should fit on one page.

  • Devan Kapoor

    Design director

    Draws every set to scale before a single item is rented.

  • Anushka Bhat

    Guest & logistics lead

    Household-level guest lists, travel, and the seating plan nobody argues with.

  • Rohan Mistry

    Product

    Turned the studio’s spreadsheets into the planner you are looking at.