Decor elements

The decor at this year's Whitney Museum of American Art gala in New York emphasized materials familiar to artists, such as paintbrushes and sketch pads. Playful centerpieces included table numbers imprinted on silver paint cans.

In Los Angeles last May, nearly 300 artists and art patrons celebrated the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s 25th anniversary at the museum's second annual Precognito gala dinner. Table numbers were painted directly onto the white paper tablecloths.

The tables at a graffiti-theme bar mitzvah designed by David Stark Design and Production, held at Center548 in New York, displayed numbers on spray-paint cans.

For a wedding produced by AaB Creates at the Altman Building in 2012, the table numbers popped out of the pages of open books. The numbers were carved out of the books' pages using an X-Acto knife.

Instead of going in numerical order at the October 2011 dinner for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art's anniversary, each table number represented an important year in the museum's 75-year history.

To fit in with the "Passport to the World" theme at the Children's Place Association's Once Upon a Time gala in Chicago in 2009, table numbers were printed on faux passports.