Recently I got an email from someone asking my advice about what to do with a pre-existing 1970’s era kitchen. The writer told me that the layout worked great, the cabinets were still in good shape and she even had the original appliances. However friends were trying to convince her to rip everything out and replace it with new cabinets, marble topped counters and stainless steel appliances.

Here’s my reply-

Your kitchen is wonderful and has loads of potential. Stay true to your convictions. I know when we bought our current old house people thought we were nuts. It was a wreck and took us 16 months of work (my husband and I did 99% of the work ourselves) just to get into the place.

Some thoughts-
1. Keep a folder of ideas or use a bulletin board to pin pictures to. I use both of these methods.
2. You need to live in a place for a while to get a feel for what needs to be done. Don’t be in a hurry…no matter what people say. They tend to want projects done pronto. Good ones take time.
3. Your kitchen is a classic 1960-70’s. Play on that theme. I’ve enclosed a photo (below) for inspiration.

Ideas To Consider

*Large printed floral fabric (Check Amy Butler’s collection. Also scout out flea markets and tag sales for vintage material)

* Linoleum flooring (make sure it’s the real thing…made of linseed)

*Sarrinen tulip chair and table (you might be able to find less expensive copies on ebay)

* Start looking for fun collectibles (rotary phone, fondue pot, coffee mugs, spice rack, etc)

For those who are pondering the same design dilemma I hope my suggestions helped you as well.

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Armada Mimarlik

Istanbul (Turkey)
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Firearm in your home is allowed in my country, but it takes quite some time to get one, you also have to have gun license (which is normal I guesss?)

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Sedef Fuar

Istanbul (Turkey)
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Access Displays Ltd
Westmead Industrial Estate
SN5 7YT Swindon (United Kingdom)
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When you or your company attend a trade show, your trade show display is the medium used to express your company image, products and services. You get one chance to attract the eye of a passerby and your display will make an impression, good or bad, depending on what you deploy as your best trade show effort and tactic.

Three seconds… that’s about how long you have to get the attention of a potential customer walking by your trade show booth. Having the right trade show display is critical to your trade show exhibiting success. Your trade show exhibit booth needs to stand out from all the other exhibit booths and get your company noticed. It has to grab qualified prospects and draw them into your trade show booth. If your trade show exhibit does not draw people to your trade show booth, then it is not making a big enough impression on the people walking by.

Avenue Road Advertising offers a wide variety of trade show displays, including pop-up displays, banner stands, folding panel displays, and much more. We use only high-quality display products and media. These have been tested to withstand repeated use and handling.

You could even consider our displays for uses other than just at trade shows and trade fairs. The displays can be used at indoor meetings and marketing events, conventions, conferences, events, job fairs, seminars, etc.

Let us give you a colorful, bright and welcoming presence at trade shows, in lobbies, malls, storefronts or at sales meetings.

http://avenueroadadvertising.com/

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Adams Exhibitions Ltd
Modular House Rose Green Road
BS5 7XE St George, Bristol (United Kingdom)
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Alfa Display & Design Ltd
Unit 17 Sandleheath Industrial
SP6 1PA Fordingbridge (United Kingdom)
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Let it be known: I love me some Christmas lights.  Despite my intense hatred of cold, I kind of love winter and all the fantastic things it brings; to wit, Christmas lights, ice skating, sledding, and snow day road anarchy.  I even fancy a little snow, and wouldn’t mind going cross country skiing or snowshoeing if I didn’t think I’d die.

But, the point of this is Christmas lights.  I wanted to post about my idea of Christmas light -fail-, but believe it or not, I couldn’t find a single example in Rocketdog, Rocketpuppy, and Danger Kitty’s annual light night.  So I’ll have to describe it, which isn’t nearly as much fun as seeing it.  Actually, seeing it isn’t very fun either, so I guess describing is okay.

Christmas light FAIL is the house that half-assedly throws a string of lights on a tree.  One tree.  Perhaps they are hoping for some sort of Jackson Pollack-esque result, but in my eyes it is sad and pathetic.  This isn’t even a result of not heeding my life saying: Go big, or go home (Actually, it’s “If you’re going to go down, go down in flames,” but I feel that’s in poor taste when discussing Christmas decorations).  The single strand, single tree is even more pathetic than Charlie Brown’s tree.  Honestly, if that’s all you’re going to do, keep the lights in the box where they belong.

But this post would be nothing without examples of what I think are awesome light displays which typically fall into two categories.

Impressive:

Infamous house of the Reindeer Birthday Party

Sorry so shaky, all pictures from our night were taken from the car, without a tripod.  Since it was night photography, the shutter is open longer, making photos more prone to blurring.

The Reindeer Birthday party was a couple years ago.  This house is no longer nearly as impressive as it was then.  Apparently the economy has hit even the reindeer.  The story behind the name is that Rocketdog and I found our way into a neighborhood with “houses of distinction.”  As we got further down the road, we ran into tons of parked cars.  Then parked animal trailers.  I can’t remember if we actually saw reindeer, but I decided it had to be a reindeer birthday party, and it stuck.  That was also the year of the mausoleum-like life-sized crèche.  The recession has been bad for over-the-top celebrations.

And….

Houses that Vomited Christmas:

House that Vomited Christmas III

I decided to post House III first because it photographed the best.  That house had EVERYTHING, including dancing icicle lights.  These weren’t your standard strands that hang down to look like icicles… These were plastic-formed icicles with lights inside.  Amazing.  They had the lights set to move almost as if the icicles were dripping.  They also had a huge star somehow mounted a good 50 feet above their house.  It was probably in a tree, but I’m thinking it was actually an act of God. (Or a Christmas miracle, if you will)

The original House That Vomited Christmas (the reason we drove up to my neighborhood, anyway) is thus:

HTVC I

This house makes me eternally happy.  It was one of the first things I fell in love with in my neighborhood.  I love me some lights.  Yo.  They leave it up a really long time after Christmas too.

HTVC II

HTVC II photographed really poorly, so I will leave you with this:  They actually took the time to decorate their RV.  That’s dedication.  There’s also a flying santa above the RV.

HTVC IV

Then you’ve got your blow-up lawn schlock.  Which is sort of a cheating version of vomiting Christmas, but vomitous nonetheless.  Apparently either winter snow people are either fans of Tony Stewart, or this family got their blow-ups from Home Depot.  Either way, the pit crew in the background was adorable.

By now you’re probably wondering, “What the hell did she mean by glow-up‽  Glow-up isn’t even a word!”  Well, it wasn’t a word.  Not until I made it a word on the first night of Hanukkah (because we felt it fitting to go look at lights to kick off the festival of lights.  Which we do not celebrate).  Glow-up is my new name for those hard plastic lawn ornaments that glow.  Glow-up.  The only thing close to Christmas light fail we saw all night was a single glow-up snowman at the end of a driveway at one of the Houses of Distinction (Reindeer birthday party’s neighbor).  However, since you wouldn’t be able to see the house in the picture, it just wouldn’t have been effective.

My second to last picture doesn’t categorize well.  It’s not impressive, and it’s not vomitous.  It’s just a head-scratcher.

Sticks in a Bucket

This is one of Rocketdog’s neighbors.  Since the year she and BILOSORD moved in, this house has been known as “Sticks in a Bucket.”  Even during the summer.  There’s just no better name for the display or the house.  They are literally sticks.  In buckets.  They show up at Thanksgiving every year without fail.  It’s almost comforting.

Last, but not least, is the second-most impressive Christmas display I’ve ever seen.  I would have put it up top with the Impressives, but it deserved to be a finale.  It speaks for itself, I think, so I shall leave you now.  My bread is almost done baking.  Nom.

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Aston Display Ltd
Brewery Street 30
B6 4JB Aston (United Kingdom)
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B Brown Display Materials
Wood Lane End 74-78
HP2 4RF Hemel Hempstead (United Kingdom)
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When I first became interested in themes a couple years ago, I was extremely disappointed with what Microsoft had to offer. Vista was a TERRIBLE machine for that. You had to work for quite a while to save any theme. But, Windows 7 makes themes extremely simple. First right click on your desktop and select personalize. You’re then at the new and improved Personalization Window. There you can choose from any one of the available Windows 7 themes. I found them all to be exemplary. I like how Microsoft is finally creating their own art style with the “Scenes” theme. This style started with the customization of the Zune, and appeared for the first time on an OS with Windows 7. Or, you could create your own theme by choosing any of the options at the bottom of the window: Desktop Background, Window Color, or Sound. Screensavers aren’t included in themes. They’re separate. When you click on one of these, and add backgrounds or change the sound or color, a new theme will appear in your Personalization Window known as “Unsaved Theme.” Simply right-click and press “Save Theme” or “Save Theme for Sharing” (If you want to email or upload a theme). You’ll be given the option to name your theme, and it’ll be there forever to change the look and feel of your PC (or at least until you either switch themes, or delete that theme). One thing that I really like is the Windows color mixer (which was also in Vista). Here you can choose any color of the rainbow for your window edges and taskbar. With themes in Windows 7, your PC will never be boring.

Hay Mas.. Si quieres Nuevos Escríbenos

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Clip International Ltd
Bristol Business Park 210
BS16 1FJ Bristol (United Kingdom)
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There’s many problems that most retail stores face that impact their sales.  One of these problems can be easily solved with the use of point of sale displays. Most people buy on impulse. You’ve most likely experienced this many times in your life. Your standing online waiting to pay for a few items when you see a sign with a product that’s on sale or some big event that you quickly memorize. It’s not something that you want to miss.

It works amazingly to get the customer to notice the special product or event.

Point of sale displays are generally found near or around the checkout counter. They are designed to get the attention of the customer and display any number of things – a new product, sales promotion, a special event coming up or any number of other things. These are often found in a variety of retail displays from posters to banners and everything in between.  You’ve seen these special displays in grocery stores in the form of batteries, candy and many other small items that can be displayed. These last minute choices while waiting online are an effective tool. This is definitely something that you’ll want to take into consideration if you are looking for a method to increase your sales.

Choosing a display to promote a new product can be done in a number of ways. You can choose a display using the actual product or you can choose to have a cardboard display or a simple sign or banner. The most important thing that you can do is to design some sort of point of sale display that will help to improve the exposure of certain products.

You can find a number of great idea’s online on how to effectively design a point of sale display that will surely improve your sales without breaking the bank.

A simple gesture is sometimes all you really need for Christmas decorating. Here in my powder room, I used one Paperwhite bulb in a kitchen mug from Anthropologie.

(Photo- Martha B.)

Related Nibs post-

Christmas Craft #6: Poinsettia

]]> http://gigaom.com/2009/12/17/show-me-the-display-innovation/ Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:56:51 +0000 Stacey Higginbotham http://gigaom.com/2009/12/17/show-me-the-display-innovation/

The Stallion cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center

When I read over the patent filings related to Apple’s (s aapl) 3-D interactive, hyper-reality displays that MacRumors is writing about today, I felt a little jolt of excitement wholly unrelated to the two cups of espresso I’d already consumed. What can I say? I’m a display nerd. And I think one of the areas most ripe for innovation is how we see the information we’re trying to consume. In other words, it’s time to start messing with our monitors.

Think about it. The web is rapidly moving to video from text and becoming increasingly personal, yet we’re still viewing it on a flat screen — sometimes two or three flat screens. The most prevalent computer of the next decade — the mobile phone– sports total screen space of some 4 inches. What if instead of merely viewing something on the screen, we could also interact with it? The basic building blocks for such an experience already exist in the form of gestural controls and touchscreens that use embedded cameras, as well as LCD screens with built-in optics to sense touch. And we have the processing power and the projectors.

So I’m hopeful that sometime in the next five years we’ll see the realization of the technology covered in Apple’s patent, which involves using a video camera to help the display react to the user’s position, or something similar. The office environment seems the most likely home for the initial innovation given the battery constraints of a cell phone (even a pico projector attached to a cell phone sucks the battery in no time). Already better visualization tools are used in the supercomputing space, but they consist mainly of several eye-popping monitors.

Frankly, I don’t want a screen; I want a projector equipped with a camera that allows me to move about my office to tackle different projects, conversations and news streams. That way I can orient myself physically in my work. Plus, a presence-awareness system could figure out what I’m working on based on my position and update my status for me.

Yeah, it’s far-fetched, but we have the cameras, the software to visually track people and ways to translate those movements into code a computer can understand. It would give our powerful CPUs something to do, while our graphics chips render the information on a wall, holographically or on a large curved display that spans a person’s visual field.

If adding a second display increases productivity between 9 percent and 30 percent, imagine what one could do if that display were both interactive and intelligent enough to figure out what you’re doing or alert you to information you need to know. If we’re gonna navigate our world in real time, we’re gonna need a better cockpit.

Related Research:

• 3-D Untethered: A Look at Mobile 3-D Technology
• 3-D Computing From Digital Cinema to GPUs

Everyone wants that Wonderful Wedding… So check out The Wonderful Wedding Show! With over 400 displays, your sure to find something to dazzle those dreams of yours. See it for yourself with two full-scale production fashion shows each day. One lucky couple will be walking away with a dream wedding at the Fairmont with a Honeymoon Vacation!

Need more info: http://www.wonderfulweddingshow.com

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ELS Displays Ltd
Old Oak Close Industrial 4a
SG15 6XD Arlesey (United Kingdom)
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• Stand construction: custom build

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Exmedia Ltd
Parkside
CV1 2NE Coventry (United Kingdom)
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Exposure Displays Ltd
Fairclough Hall
SG4 7DP Herts (United Kingdom)
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• Stand construction: custom build