Assembling Your Design Scheme: Mood Boards vs New Technology

As we come to the end of this week and after covering the

1. Making the Best of a Room: Floor Plans & Layouts,
2. Making the Most of Your Designer,
3. Lighting for Every Room

I thought it would be perfect to end on a high note, and focus on "Assembling a Design Scheme".

Usually I begin presenting my early ideas through mood & inspiration boards, while always looking at the layouts and floor plans that we have agreed upon.

Over the course of the years, and with the race against the technological revolution, I have used many different ways to present my inspiration boards.

Some have been tactile, with samples of all materials (including stones, fabrics, woods, metals, etc)

and more recently I have taken my IPad to my client's home and presented all the ideas this way, using a PowerPoint presentation as my base.

Each format of presenting has it's benefits and perks as well as it's flaws, but we just have to choose the right approach for that specific client. Ultimately I want my client to understand and appreciate what I am trying to put across. If they are simply not very "tech friendly" and I appear with a power point presentation - well, I think you see what I mean.

So keeping in the spirit of baring all here.. 

I am going to share some of my early examples .. (apologies in advance about some of the quality, but a few of these are over 11 years old!)

 

Examples using materials, and images as well as the floor plans to demonstrate ideas 

These mood boards were made for a Collection of Brands of Spas inspired by different locations such as Bali, Egypt, etc.. These were then incorporated into schemes for various Spa franchisees.

These 2 examples show how from a picture in a magazine we were inspired to design our own fabric for this 2006 hotel design. The diagonal navy blue stripes, and later made in an aqua, were made specifically for this project and these rooms by a local textile firm.

These have all been effective ways of showing my clients my very early ideas and are meant to ignite a conversation; to create a dialogue between us, so that it just brings us one step closer to our end goal. 

You all know I am using Pinterest (see this post)  as a new form of collecting and gathering images, but more recently I was introduced to yet another extraordinary website through some *twitter* friends, that allows you to compile and assemble your images, and of course I had to try it out.

It is called Olioboard, and for anyone in interior design or even if you are thinking of ideas to present your designer but want to have a feel for them first, give it a go. Here are my first 2 attempts, so be nice! 

I thought it would be fun to try and put one together a little more haphazardly and the other to try and recreate the layout of the room. Which do you prefer?

This are top 3 points for why I am liking creating boards here so far:

1. Can upload all of my images at once
2. or instantly grab them from any site and instantly categorize them into my own libraries.
3. If I'm in a sharing mood, then each image allows me to decide whether or not I want to make them public! But if I wish to work for a while without anyone seeing, then it can be *private*.
4. I don't need to use Photoshop or any other image editor! Yes, it's true, and my favorite time saving tool.

Hope you have enjoyed these posts this week as much as I have this week..

I have Big.. well HUGE.. news for next week which is all about

Curtains, Draperies, Romans, Valances, Hardware - you name it!

Everything you ever wanted to know about them and why YOU MUST HAVE THEM!

And finally, on Friday (drum roll please...) there will be the very first giveaway on the blog to really kick off 2012 with a bang!

So charge those cameras, and connect to Dec-a-Porter on Facebook because you don't want to miss any of the extras coming your way next week.

Thank you all for your sweet comments and feedback, it's always nice to hear your thoughts. Wishing you all an inspired weekend and big shout out to The Curtain Exchange & Leslie from The Kaleidoscope Partnership for making this happen.