Interior designers generally have a very good color sense. It’s often one of the reasons they’ve pursued a career in the field in the first place: they can manipulate color choices and materials into very pleasing combinations. It’s quite an uncanny ability and one most people (non-designers) really struggle with.

In my years of teaching interior design college-level courses, I have grappled with the relevance of color theory in developing color competence. This is for several reasons, not the least of which is the overriding question of theory versus application. I’ve pondered these questions:

• Is it important to understand what analogous, complementary, and triadic color schemes are, when NO interior designer I have ever met begins building a palette based on these as goals?

• The color wheel—as a framework for understanding color relationships—is important for artists and painters who mix paint pigments to arrive at secondary and tertiary colors, tints and shades, but how relevant is it really for interior designers who typically select from already manufactured fabrics, paint colors, rugs, and wallcoverings?

• There are no absolutes with color application, no definitive rights or wrongs. As with any creative pursuit, a successful design may result from breaking or bending some of the standard strategies and manipulating variables in innovative ways. Therefore, how can color theory be taught in a way that allows freedom from restrictions?

So, in my teaching, I have always struggled to understand whether teaching color theory is really building false parallels between theory and application. 

When interior designers don’t actually make color choices based on theory, how important is color theory really?

Often—when specifying lighting fixtures for a space or designing a lighting scheme for a new construction project—interior designers select and locate fixtures based on a best guess approach. This often results in success because one bulb can be swapped out for another with more or less intensity fairly easily, OR dimmers can be used to adjust the light intensity to what works best. This latter approach—relying on dimmers to tweak the lighting intensity—is particularly useful, as the residential building codes and energy codes now require dimmers in residential new construction and renovation projects. 

Pro Tip: The 2024 edition of the International Residential Code, Section 1104.2.1 requires that all permanently installed luminaires (light fixtures) in habitable rooms (which excludes closets and hallways) be controlled with a manual dimmer or automatic shutoff control (motion sensor). Not all jurisdictions may be enforcing this requirement, but wherever dimmers are used, there is great latitude to control light levels. Need a codes refresh? Check out our codes handbook here.

The rationale behind dimmer and sensor mandates is not to accommodate inaccurate lighting level calculations. It is rather to reduce energy consumption when lighting levels are too bright, or when lights are left on in rooms that are not occupied. 

Is There a Formula to Compute Appropriate Lighting Intensity?

Join The DTS Files to learn exactly how to calculate how much light a space needs.

2025 will be a milestone year for me, God willing, because it is the year I will turn the same age my dad was when he lost his very short battle with cancer. 

He died when I was 17, and back then, 44 seemed SO old. My dad owned a popular restaurant and catering business and a beautiful home, had five kids, was happily married to my mom, and was a powerful, charismatic presence. 

Now, as I approach the same age, I realize just how young he was and how his life was really just beginning. 

Losing him at such a young age has given me a unique perspective on how precious my time is and has majorly impacted my priorities. It is also why I spend time every Friday reflecting on how I spend my time every single week. 

As I plan for 2025, I reviewed all my notes over the past year and noticed some consistent themes of things I didn’t enjoy or realizations I had that I ignored for MONTHS. 

And this is NOT the year for me to hold onto anything that does not serve me. 

So, in honor of my dad, one of my all-time favorite humans in the entire world and the person who has had the most significant impact on who I am today, here are the 11 things I’m saying BYEEEEE to in 2025. (in no particular order) …

In 2024, my team and I wrote 49 original blog posts for interior designers (this one makes it 50). That’s a big dip from 2023, when we wrote 90 original posts (based on our own experience!!). What can I say? We love nothing more than sharing insights to help interior designers improve their business operations and client experience.

While we didn’t write as many blog posts this year, we introduced plenty of new ways to help interior designers through our trainings in The Workroom. This year’s highlights included:

• Beyond Retail: Increase Revenue + Profits by Selling Wholesale Furnishings

• Elevate Your Design Presentation live training 

• Mastering Asana for Interior Designers

• Permits to Punchlists: Essential Construction Training, Management, & Pricing Tips for Interior Designers 

And I can’t forget to mention the three cohorts of our signature program, The Designed to Scale® Method. What an honor to help so many designers through my tried & true framework. 

If you haven’t had a chance to dive into those resources linked above, I highly recommend checking them out. In the meantime, don’t miss our 10 most popular blog posts of 2024. These are the posts that resonated most with our community of interior designers—each one thoughtfully crafted, 100% human-written, with no shortcuts or AI assistance here.

And, of course, a huge thank you for being here, reading my blog, The Weekly Install®, The Design Brief™, and my Instagram posts. 

YOU fuel everything we do.

Alright, let’s count down the top 10 posts of the year.

The key to impactful lighting design is truly layering. To appreciate the impact of layering to an impressive lighting scheme, let’s consider the opposite:

• A kitchen that is lit by just one center surface-mounted fluorescent fixture

• A bathroom lit solely by a three-bulb fixture over the mirror

• An elementary classroom that is uniformly lit throughout by strip fluorescents—very effective for its intended purpose, but not at all interesting

A well-designed lighting scheme that adds beauty to a space needs to include a visual hierarchy of light levels: ambient lighting in most areas, but other areas with pools of light for visual interest. 

By layering lighting, you are not just lighting the air in a room, you are often lighting walls, a ceiling, art pieces, surfaces, and other elements of interest, and letting that light bounce back into the space. You are deliberately putting higher intensity light levels in some areas, and lessening it in others.

Perhaps it is because nature contains different light levels—across the landscape and over the progression of time—that we are intrinsically drawn to a variation and disparity in light levels within our visual panorama. It speaks to our biological need for stimulation and relief from monotony. 

Not only do we derive satisfaction from seeing natural elements and the changing landscape that evolves over the passage of hours, days, and months, but light greatly impacts human health and well-being. Countless studies over the last 50 years have confirmed the link between natural light and healing and recovery.

It is also interesting to consider that there are really only three sources of light: the sun, fire, and electrification. Until 150 years ago—when Thomas Edison developed the first practical type of incandescent lighting in 1879—the sun and fire were the only available sources for millennia. Our ancestors were subject to substantial risk from kerosene lamps, candles, and other sources of fire-produced light to illuminate their homes after the sun went down. 

Today, great advancements in solid-state lighting, such as LEDs mean that we can have an abundance of light quality, sources, and effects. Light—natural or electrified—manipulates mood, enhances functionality, encourages activity, and enhances visual interest in our surroundings. 

So, let’s look at how to manipulate light—both natural daylight from the sun, and electrified (artificial) light—to create environments that are optimally pleasing to our visual senses. 

Join The DTS Files to learn how to layer lighting in your next interior design project.

I have always been someone who looks to books when I need to increase my understanding of a topic. Years ago, when I got a puppy, I bought several books on raising a dog. I enhanced my gardening knowledge by reading several books on flower gardening specific to my climate (north and cold!!!!). In today’s age, where an immediate Google search on any topic can provide a wealth of information from various sources, I still feel like there is nothing like reading a good book that dives deep into a single topic of interest. 

I’m sure that Amazon loves me for the plethora of books I purchase every year. And when it comes to topic knowledge, it HAS to be the hard copy variety which can be easily referenced, dog-eared, and highlighted. 

And what do physical books have over online content? They include everything an author has to convey about a topic in a thorough, comprehensive, and systematic format. And they are always readily at hand on your bookcase.

I LOVE books!! I LOVE design! And I LOVE books about design.

As a tenured college professor (following my 20+ year interior design career, I have taught interior design at three different Midwest universities over the last 14 years), I have read or reviewed countless interior design textbooks to determine the very best, most thorough, and most understandable on a wide variety of design topics. 

Often, interior designers ask me and Katie where they might find training classes on interior design principle specific topics they feel deficient in. My response is often to recommend a high-quality textbook on the subject. It’s a cheaper training option that has permanence in that the material remains always at your fingertips. 

Without further adieu, here are my top book picks for residential interior designers. 

Interior designers need to understand the attributes of LED lighting to make informed choices about both lamps (commonly referred to as light bulbs) and luminaires (commonly referred to as lighting fixtures). Lighting can elevate and transform an environment, and with the increased complexity of LED technology, and the related energy-efficiency building codes, being a well-informed designer is critical.

Why Are LEDs Becoming Universally Used?

If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed the term "Master" has quietly faded out of the interior design industry's vocabulary. A few years ago, HGTV stopped using "master bedroom," "master bathroom," and "master suite" in favor of "primary" or "main." Now, real estate sites like Zillow use "owner's suite" or "primary suite" to describe the largest bedroom in a home.

So why the change? To understand it fully, we need to look at a bit of history.

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