Capturing Great Designs
with a Design File
Building a house taught me that design
magazines are indispensable when you
are trying to relate an idea to a builder.
In this case, a picture wasn’t only worth
a thousand words, it was worth three
fistfuls of hair that I saved every time I
could refer to what I was talking about
in picture form.
However, my system of hauling around these design behemoths was quickly taking a toll on my back -- and the difficulty to find an idea I had seen in one stretched my patience to the limit. If you’ve ever built a house from the ground up, you understand that patience is always in short supply.
A better way was needed. That’s when I developed my two-part system: a clippings file and a design portfolio. Both are indispensable for holding onto important design ideas and elements.
The clippings file is an accordion folder that I broke into various rooms and areas ranging from garage to garden, master bedroom to foyer. I ripped out pages from the design magazines of anything that looked at all interesting, putting the clippings into the appropriate room folder. This one easy-to-carry file had everything when I needed it, and stored all the novel ideas in one tidy location.
The design portfolio consists of a large watercolor drawing pad because they have large, stiff, and sturdy pages. This is where I made a “room collage” of elements that I wanted in a particular room. Pictures would come out of the clippings file that showed styles that I liked or features I wanted and were glued to a page in the design portfolio.
A bathroom page, for example, would have pictures of the bathroom fixtures, paint chips, cabinet ideas, and other elements that I wanted in that particular bathroom. I also labeled the page with the room’s name at the top. The nice thing was that it kept all the design ideas that I definitely wanted to one see-it-at-a-glance page. And, it helped me and the builder stay on the same page, so to speak.
So don’t throw away all those great design magazines you have until you’ve made a clippings file. Then you can recycle them, fully confident that you got the best out of them for yourself.
© 2007 Kathryn Weber, all rights reserved
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Kathryn Weber is the publisher of the Everydayclean.com Cleaning Calender, that calender that puts you in control of your home by ending the power struggle. For more information log on to http://tinyurl.com/d9rh5.
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©2001-2007 Kathryn Weber
All rights reserved.
