Our in-house tenured design professor and certified interior designer, Gloria, always says that the Design Elements (that every interior design student learns about early on) are like the ingredients that go into a recipe. Add more sugar, and you'll have a sweeter dish; add more spices, and you’ll have a more savory one. 

Likewise, interior designers are adept at adding line, shape, pattern, texture, and color (the design elements) in thoughtful amounts to arrive at a desired design outcome and aesthetic result.                                                                                                           

We’ve covered some of the other design elements in previous editions of The Design Brief™:

• Using LINE Effectively in Interiors

• Color Theory 1

• Color Theory 2

• Using Color to Alter Spatial Perceptions

• Effective Interior Design Lighting Strategies

In today’s edition of The Design Brief™, we’ll delve into how you can use SHAPE and FORM to manipulate a space and achieve a specific outcome.

As an interior designer, when it comes to specifying kitchen, bath, and office cabinetry, there are several options available. In some respects, there are significant differences. But in other respects, specs for cheaper or less customized cabinetry options can be swapped out with few discernible differences. Variations with cabinetry selections exist within internal structure, joinery methods, wood species quality, hardware, and of course, cost.

Let’s begin with top-notch, premium cabinetry options.

It could be argued that no single person has influenced American architecture and design more than Frank Lloyd Wright. You likely have some familiarity with his life and work. But you may not realize the extent to which his life was filled with controversy, eccentricity, scandalous love affairs and marriages, tragedy, family desertion, perilous debt, and financial ruin. He was hugely charismatic, also pompous, a narcissist, a curmudgeon, a control freak, a self-promoter, a manipulator, an adulterer, a home wrecker, and a genius.

Read on. His story is just too interesting not to delve into. 

In my years of teaching college-level interior design students, I use the analogy that the elements of design are like the ingredients in a recipe: flour, sugar, salt. The elements are the building blocks used selectively by designers to create the desired effects in spaces. The principles of design equate to how those ingredients or building blocks are artfully combined to arrive at a flavorful and pleasing outcome. The principles are the strategies. 

The listing of design elements and principles varies by author or theorist, but I have always referred to these as the overriding quintessential elements and principles of interior design. 

We have covered the design elements COLOR and LIGHT in several posts:

    Color Theory 1

    Color Theory 2

    Using color to alter spatial perceptions

    LED lighting

    Lighting design

    Calculating lighting levels

Now let’s tackle how various types of LINE, or linear elements, can be artfully used in interior spaces to arrive at desired effects. 

Of all the tools that interior designers have in their toolkits, none is as impactful and effective as color. Not only does color provide the mood and liveliness in spaces, it can also be used to alter our visual perception. Particular tints and shades of colors used in combination can create the perception of more (or less) space than actually exists, produce an increased sense of openness, highlight and draw attention to one wall over the others, or, conversely, create the sense of a more constricted, cozy, or comforting space.

This blog and this blog covered some basics of color theory. Here, we will take a look at how color can be used to alter the perceived size of a space.

In our blog post, Color Theory Part 1: Color Language and Color Attributes, we explored some basic color theory. Here, we will delve into how colors interact with one another and talk more about how interior designers make color selections effectively.

There is a lot to say about how colors interact together. And this is at the heart of how interior designers put together color palettes and schemes. That is where the artistry happens. And the interaction of multiple colors together can be extraordinarily visually impactful, eliciting strong human emotions and reactions.

Keep reading for the second lesson from Dr. Gloria on color theory and how it impacts your design process and client onboarding.

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?