The place of honour, and which side is right

Every arrangement starts from the place of honour, seat 1. The general rule is that the next most important seat is to its right, and that is where half the misunderstandings begin: it is the right of the person seated, not of the person looking at the hall.

The person drawing the plan looks at it from the back of the hall, with the stage at the top. From there seat 2 ends up to the left of seat 1. Nobody has made a mistake: these are two points of view, and on paper the seated person’s view wins.

With an odd number of seats

Seat 1 goes in the centre, seat 2 to its right, seat 3 to its left, and so on, alternating outwards. In a front row of seven, the sequence seen from the hall is 6, 4, 2, 1, 3, 5, 7.

With an even number of seats

There is no single centre. You create a double centre, a kind of joint presidency: seat 1 goes centre right and the others follow, alternating left and right. The same applies when two dignitaries carry equal weight and neither should look second.

Numbered seats

Row numbering follows the same logic. Once seat A1 is fixed, odd numbers run to the right (A3, A5, A7) and even numbers to the left (A2, A4, A6), row after row. If the venue already has its own numbering, made for ticketing rather than protocol, keep a second one for protocol use only.

In CerimoniereWeb the seat number follows the order of precedence, so rank can be read straight off the plan. The reasoning is the same, though, and it works just as well with an A3 sheet and a pencil.