Photography by Mark Madeo
I’m not a thrifty man by nature, but after cobbling together enough money to buy my first single-family home, I wasn’t about to take out a second mortgage just to get the place decorated. In fact, the very concept of hiring an interior designer or color consultant strikes me as frivolous on an intestinal level. Color theory and design inspiration is free online, and at the end of the day, what looks right is right--because perfection in home decor is in the eye of the beholder. That last thing I need is some woman named Astrid telling me my walls would look better in “Butter Crème.”
But that isn’t to say that even I, in all my brazen hubris, couldn’t do a better job with the help of my MacBook Pro. If the Mac can help me in other creative pursuits, why not put it to use in snazzing up Casa Philippe? I did my research, put in a bunch of nights at the keyboard, and came up with an interior design that suits me just perfectly. And now I’m going to show you how you can do the same for your own home.
First we’ll look at how you can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to make informed color decisions--by painting Pantone swatches directly on your walls. Next, we’ll explore photography. I’ll explain how inkjet technology can turn your shots into art prints and how to use photos to inspire digital illustration. From there, we’ll run through my favorite iPhone apps and websites that can streamline, enhance, and inform your design process. Finally, we end our tour with a look at Mac-oriented tchotkes and accessories that are interior-design elements all on their own. So even if you don’t want to use your Mac to create a living space with all the bold, iconographic simplicity that Apple is known for, you can still buy your way into Apple’s 21st-century modern aesthetic.
You don’t have to be a print designer to play with Pantone colors--and we’re not just talking about leafing through those swatch books for kicks and giggles. Pantone’s Fashion+Home library contains 1,925 vibrant colors, and every color is available in different exterior and interior paints from Fine Paints of Europe (FPE). Whether you’re color-matching your walls to Pantone-spec’d furniture or simply using the Pantone system to make informed color choices, your final results will have the designy flair that richly pigmented Pantone reproduction is known for. The paint from FPE--imported from Holland--is relatively expensive, but as my independent painting contractor said, “You get what you pay for.” Completely unprompted, he said FPE paint lasts longer, requires fewer coats, and is probably the best paint available.
To choose your Pantone paint, you can finger-swipe through the myPantone app (see page 4) or peruse a printed Fashion+Home swatch collection for absolute color accuracy. You can also create a close approximation of how your colors will look in (or on) your actual home by “painting” them onto your walls using the Color Replacement Tool in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. This tool lets you reskin a surface, all while retaining the shadows and highlights of your original photo content. Here’s how to do it:
>> Load the Pantone swatches from Pantone’s Fashion+Home Digital Color Library CD (it retails for $50 MSRP).
>> Load a photo of your interior into Photoshop or Elements, and use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to define an area of your walls that you want to paint over. In Image A, my “before” photo, I’ve lassoed over the middle sawtooth wall panel. Creating a lassoed selection isn’t absolutely necessary, but helps in confining your paint strokes to a specific area.
Image A - Notice how the glass blocks shine natural light that's
reflected on the walls. These highlights will be preserved by
Photoshop's Color Replacement tool.
>> Now choose a Pantone color from your Swatches palette, select the Color Replacement Tool, and begin painting the wall within your selected area. Create a new lassoed selection for every portion of wall you want to cover--it’s like using digital painters tape that keeps your brush strokes off of areas that shouldn’t be painted.
>> To paint on unadorned walls that aren’t covered by any objects or obscured by furniture, I choose the largest brush diameter possible with the following tool settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Contiguous; Tolerance: 100%. Then I tap a single time inside the selected area, and the entire area becomes Pantonified.
>> To paint in areas covered by other objects (like the sawtooth wall panel behind the tripod lamp in Image B), I use these settings: Mode: Color; Sampling: Continuous; Limits: Find Edges; Tolerance: 15%. With these settings and a small-diameter brush (about the size of the one pictured over the antique scale), you can paint between objects quite effectively, rarely painting over framed photos, furniture legs, or anything else that should remain unpainted. This process allows you to retain your original shadows and highlights--note the tripod shadow on the left sawtooth wall panel and the light shining through the glass blocks at the top of the middle panel.
Image B - The Color Replacement tool does a very good job in
automatically replacing only the color you've identified for
substitution. Still, when painting over a wall with lots of objects on
it, it helps to use a small brush diameter to prevent "paint" from
going in the wrong places.
Be aware that unless your monitor is perfectly calibrated, it won’t display the Pantone swatches with absolute accuracy. Also, it helps to use photos shot in flat lighting in order to reduce hot spots and reflections (in Image B, you can see how the white picture frames picked up a yellow cast from the original wall paint). Regardless, my Photoshop color replacement process, used in conjunction with real-world Pantone swatches, will give you a fantastic head start in making color choices.
In Image C you can see my final color decisions. From left to right, I used 13-0002 (White Sand), 16-1406 (Atmosphere), 17-1506 (Cinder), 18-1306 (Iron) and 18-1434 (Etruscan Red). The hallway is also painted White Sand. The codes of my colors actually bear strong relevance to one another, and knowing the coding system can help you make color choices.
Image C - Understanding Pantone's numerical codes helped me quickly choose warm gray tones based on reddish hues. The codes helped me choose three grays--Atmosphere, Cinder, and Iron--that would create a perfect graduated grayscale-branding effect.
The two numbers before the hyphen refer to a color’s relative lightness on a scale from 11 (lightest) to 19 (darkest). The second pair of numbers specify different hues on a 64-step color wheel; 01 is yellow-green, 64 is green-yellow, and all the other colors of the rainbow are represented in between. The third pair of numbers represent the color’s chroma level--the intensity and saturation of the hue itself. The chroma scale is divided into 65 steps, with 00 being neutral and 64 being maximum saturation.
Using Pantone’s system, I was able to make some informed decisions on paint. Notice that Iron and Etruscan Red, the two colors separated by my hallway entrance, share nearly the same code--only the saturation levels of their chroma differ dramatically. Also notice that the hues of my four main accent colors range from 13 to 15, putting each one squarely in the red portion of the color wheel. Finally, I deliberately chose one-step lightness increments for my sawtooth wall panels, creating a very graphic-designy grayscale-banding effect.
There’s a method to Pantone’s numbering madness! So learn the system, and your paint choices will develop quickly and elegantly.
Now that you have paint on your walls, it’s time to put down a third layer--in the form of dazzling art photography. Fine-art photo printing is within the reach of most consumer-grade inkjet photo printers, and it becomes absolutely spectacular when done by those printers’ professional-grade cousins.
The key to art photography is, of course, your photo’s contents. Your shot of the Brooklyn Bridge in twilight is artsy; the photo of cousin Jerry holding his Budweiser up to the camera is not. In a previous Maclife.com article, we delved into the secrets to great shooting and photo editing, but here we’ll focus on print media, which can unlock a photo’s final degree of finesse. For this article, I used Epson media, but Canon offers a comparable lineup in the prosumer desktop space.
Image A - Printed on canvas, this 3-foot giclée print of a Mark
Madeo photograph has tricked a lot of people into thinking it's a
photorealistic painting in the style of Richard Estes and Ralph Goings.
First off, throw glossy paper out the door. For most images, you’ll want to be printing on softer, nonreflective matte paper and even stretchable canvas. Lately, I’ve been using the Epson R2880 printer, which supports the full range of Epson’s fine art media in sheets up to 13 by 19 inches and rolls sized 13 inches by 20 feet. On the “low” end of Epson’s lineup, I like Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte and Watercolor Paper Radiant White. The first one is bright white with a flat matte finish, providing great highlight and shadow detail without any reflections. I love it for black-and-white prints produced in the R2880’s special Advanced B&W Photo mode. The second option (despite its name) isn’t quite as radiantly white, but it has a textured surface that imbues your photo with a more artistic, painterly appearance.
On the ultra high end, you can opt for Epson’s Velvet Fine Art Paper, which is 100 percent cotton rag, features a luxurious textured grain, and purports to offer the densest blacks of any cotton-based inkjet paper around. This is beautiful media, and I have found its blacks to be superior as advertised, so don’t hide it behind a piece of glass unless longevity is a big concern. Finally, you might consider Premium Canvas Matte, a polyester/cotton blend with a pronounced woven texture. Because it can be stretched on wooden frames and has exactly the same canvas grain you’d see on hand-brushed paintings, this material is ideal for not just photos but also giclée prints of digital illustrations and painting reproductions (“giclée” is just a fancy term for inkjet-based fine-art printing).
Image B - These three prints represent just a fraction of the wonderful (and insanely high-res) images I've downloaded from the Library of Congress. Once you start sifting through the archives, you won't be able to stop.
The R2880 supports Premium Canvas Matte, but with a maximum roll width of 13 inches, you can’t output anything of breathtaking size. You can, however, send your digital files to a production house that has one of Epson’s (or Canon’s) wide-format inkjet printers. The photo you see in Image A (a piece by Mac|Life staff photographer Mark Madeo) was printed on the Epson Stylus Pro 9880, which supports media of widths up to 44 inches. Mark’s photo is 36x24 inches wide, and a piece this size--printed and stretched on a wooden frame--would run you about $220. This isn’t inexpensive, but the results are spectacular and elevate your photography hobby--and home decor--to a new level. For more info on pricing and how to prepare your digital files, check out www.photoworkssf.com.
Image C - Unlike photographic images, vector-based art files are very, very small. The 54x36-inch print you see here was generated from a 1MB file--and could have been blown up to the size of a building if I had the printer to do that.
If 13x19-inch prints suit you fine, a printer like the Epson R2880 or Canon Pro9500 Mark II is all you need to create wall-ready, museum-quality artwork at home. There are various ways to mount and display your prints, but one of the easiest (and most durable) methods is to use preassembled, UV-protected glass frames. All the photos shown in Image B were downloaded from the Library of Congress website (see page 3) and mounted in Artcare “archival protection systems” (www.nielsen-bainbridge.com). These framing kits include 4-ply, precut beveled mats and UV-protected glass and come in a wide variety of sizes supporting print areas up to 10.5 by 13.5 inches. If you can’t find prefab frames in the right sizes or don’t want frames at all, you can mount your images on acid-free foam core with 3M Photo Mount spray, which is also acid free. Finish off these projects (especially canvas prints) with a protective spray like PremierArt Print Shield to protect against UV rays and scuffs.
Image D - For a thorough explanation of using Illustrator's Pen tool, go to Youtube.com/watch?v=5DzpT8POAME.
If you want to take your photography into another dimension entirely, you can use it as the source material for digital illustration. The Roy Lichtenstein–style pieces shown on page 32 and in Image C were created by tracing over photos of my living room using the Pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. After outlining all key elements using Bézier curves (Image D), finishing the drawing is a simple matter of filling objects with solid colors, slanted lines, and Ben-Day dots, which can be found in Illustrator’s Swatch library under Patterns > Basic Graphics. I went the pop art Lichtenstein route, but remember that any digital illustration can be printed on fine-art media, and vector-based line art reproduces particularly well. And if you use Premium Canvas Matte, you can even paint directly on top of your inkjet prints with acrylics to create a mixed-media masterpiece (Image E).
Image E - If you want to paint in colors yourself, make sure to use Canvas Matte, not Canvas Satin. (NOTE: That's Flo's hand--not Jon's!)
18 websites for incredible high-res photos, supercool interior products, and daily design inspiration.
Your tax dollars help pay for maintaining the amazing bank of photo archives at the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), so consider making a few withdrawals. Many (if not most) of the photos in our national archive can be freely downloaded and printed out for display in your home. Just look for restrictions, if any, under “Rights Information” in each photo’s bibliographic details. You’ll find B&W shots of cityscapes, rural life, historical figures, and other photographic expressions of the American experience. Many images are huge high-res TIFF files ranging from 20 to 150MB, and some date back to the very earliest days of photography--like the 1851 panoramic photo of San Francisco Bay shown here.
(click to enlarge) This 10MB TIFF from the Library of Congress is one of the archive's smaller files.
To get a clear idea of the archive’s best material, go to Shorpy.com, a vintage photography blog that seems to pull its finest entries from the Library of Congress. Also check out Stockvault.net and Morguefile.com, which keep searchable archives of modern high-res photography that can be used for personal, noncommercial use. Much of the material is quite wall-worthy.
A storefront for some 800 antique and mid-century modern dealers, 1stdibs.com will blow your mind with its range of furniture, lighting, artwork, and curios. It’s the first place to look if you need a George Nakashima end table, a Cold War–era naval searchlight, or a circa-1920s beekeeper’s helmet. Prices on 1stdibs run quite steep, so if you’re looking for mid-century industrial chic at relatively affordable prices, go to AmericanFurnishings.com, which is where I picked up my antique red metal shop wheelbarrow (illustrated on the previous page). For much more contemporary (and Mac-y) design elements, check out the thoroughly groovy-modern Nova68.com, as well as lighting from Lumens.com and Ylighting.com.
Captivating art or antique beekeeper's helmet? It's both, courtesy of Radio Guy, which sells its curios via 1stdibs.com.
The web is lousy with blog-style sites that showcase slick interiors, hip new products, and one-of-a-kind curios. Here’s a list of my favorites in alphabetical order:
Apartmenttherapy.com: Aesthetic is thoroughly hip with a slant toward affordable and modern. Includes a technology section.
ApartmentTherapy.com brought Matthew Borgatti's cosmonaut lamp to the attention of the hipster masses.
Betterlivingthroughdesign.com: Lots of blogs showcase cool decor elements, but this one organizes better than most. Love the dropdown menus.
Design-milk.com: Extends its savvy design eye from architecture to art to interiors to technology. Lots of cool
stuff here.
Dezeen.com: A bold, simple architecture and interiors blog with a well-trained eye for cool.
Inhabitat.com: Neato architecture and products geared toward environmentally friendly lifestyles.
Mocoloco.com: Confusing page interface, but whoever runs this blog has an eye for incredibly unique architecture, interiors, lighting, furniture, and more.
If not for Mocoloco.com, we never would have discovered the decidedly Apple-like Andrea Air Purifier.
Remodelista.com: The bloggers have a sophisticated eye for classic modernism. Nothing too wild here. They find stuff that would actually work in most homes.
Trendir.com: New home products galore. Focuses on stuff you can buy and leaves all the art and architecture posts for the other blogs.
Yankodesign.com: With the tagline “Form Beyond Function,” the folks at Yanko showcase some of the most modern, futuristic interiors and lifestyle products you’ll ever find. A very slick and well-executed design site.
Next Page: Pocket-Size Design Consultants >>
Six iPhone apps succeed in the world of design--but two Mac applications fail.
When I began my research in Mac-assisted home design, I fully expected to review two applications that claim to help one quickly and easily create 3D models of home interiors--rooms, surface materials, furniture and all. But after three vexing hours spent with Microspot Interiors and Punch Home & Landscape Design Studio, I decided it would be a poor use of magazine pages to review either package. Both applications are extremely frustrating to use, particularly Home & Landscape Design Studio, which has an awful, non-intuitive interface (and I’m someone who jumped right into Adobe Illustrator, an application that leaves many confused).
If you’re already comfortable with 3D modeling software, these interior design apps might have something to offer. But if you’re looking for a genuinely easy-to-use room layout program, consider Home Interior Layout Designer, detailed below. It’s one of six iPhone apps that has something worthwhile to offer the DIY decorator.
This free app lets you grab an iPhone photo, extract color info from any portion of it and then find the closest Sherwin-Williams paint match, along with two complementary colors. Sadly, you can’t see the full swatch collection in one fell swoop, but if you’re committed to the paints offered by Messrs. Sherwin and Williams, this app is an invaluable tool.
Benjamin Moore’s free app includes color extraction tools that trump Sherwin-Williams’, and you can also swipe your finger across a color wheel to view the full Benjamin Moore swatch collection. Pick a swatch to see harmony groupings and graded saturations of the color you’ve chosen. It’s a must-download pocket partner for anyone investing in Benjie Moore color.
Pantone’s app costs $9.99, but you get nine virtual Pantone swatch collections, nifty color-extraction tools, and the largest selection of color-harmony options we’ve seen on the iPhone. The Fashion+Home collection maps directly to Pantone wall paint colors, and I used the app to email my final palette (see page 35, Image C EDIT THIS LINK) to friends. Search Maclife.com for “myPantone” to read the full review.
Message to all major paint, tile, countertop and window covering manufacturers: Distribute a free app that lets prospective customers quickly peel through your catalog. With mySurface, Dupont does just that for its Corian and Zodiaq lines of kitchen and bath countertops. Search via a color slider, tap a swatch for a larger image, then call an 800 number for a sample.
This $2.99 app may not let you design in 3D, but it’s easy to use, and provides most everything you’ll need for deciding “what goes where” in an empty room. Just define your room size and shape, and then begin tapping to add furniture, appliances, and architectural elements from various menus. Includes nifty measuring tools for accurate room planning. We’ll do a full review in a future issue.
This $3.99 app turns your iPhone into a handheld art gallery, helping you decide which reprints of timeless classics might look best in your home. Browse by periods or by specific artists in alphabetical order, then create a thumbnail gallery of their pieces. Works can be viewed individually or in slideshows. Includes biographical info, and images can be saved to your Camera Roll!
When it's time to accessorize your home, think different with Mac-inspired decor and high-tech, high-style iPod docks.
A. These iSteam Mac and iSteam iPhone posters ($15, www.isteammac.com) by artist Kevin Tong are inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and HG Wells–style steampunk. Also available as T-shirts!
B. Graphic artist Susan Kare designed icons and interface elements for the early Macintosh, as well as these removable wall graphics from LTL Prints ($39.95 and up, www.ltlprints.com).
C. The Icon Collection of pillows by Throwboy ($29 each, $149 for the set of six, www.throwboy.com) includes handcrafted, fleece pillows shaped like the icons for Photo Booth, the Finder, Dashboard, iChat, iTunes, and iPhoto (not pictured).
D. These handmade fleece pillows by MySuiteStuff ($15 each, $80 for six, $130 for 10, www.mysuitestuff.com) are right out of an art director’s Creative Suite dreams.
E. Roth’s Music Cocoon MC4 tube amp (£395, $629 at press time, www.rothaudio.co.uk) warms the sound from your iPod, iPhone, CD player, or other device, and looks good doing it. Just BYO speakers.
F. The limited-edition Pantone Flight Stools ($549, www.pantone.com) were designed and made by London design team Barber Osgerby.
G. The Multipot ($199, www.multipot.com/en/) is a multiuse charging station and lamp. You can plug up to five devices into sockets under the lid, and the cords are neatly hidden by the pot.
H. Rotaliana’s Diva lamp (360 Euros, $515 at press time, www.rotaliana.it/en/) has an extendible iPod dock, a pop-up arm with LED lamp, built-in speakers, FM radio, audio inputs, and a remote.
