Here's a great new blog

I believe in the blogosphere, I really do. When I started a year-and-a-half ago I knew absolutely nothing about any of this. I'd go as far as to say that I'd never read a blog until I started my own. I figured it out eventually and I have learned more in this brief time than I thought was possible. More exciting than what I already know is what I'll learn as I continue down this path. Where's it lead? Who knows and who cares? I have met some amazing people in the last year-and-a-half and networking with other bloggers has to be the best part of this whole exercise. Between my readers and the other bloggers I know, I feel plugged into something here and that's pretty darn cool if you ask me.

Another highlight is when I get the chance to help out someone who's starting a new blog. With that said, my dear friend Kevin has started a new blog he's calling The Restless Sybarite. Kevin's also moving to New Orleans in two days and following his adjustment to that strangely enchanting city promises to be a non-stop thrill ride.

So please pop over and visit with my friend Kevin. Keep going back to so you can witness first hand the making of a new, New Orleanian.

Interior design tools for the iPhone, first up Sherwin-Williams

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about an up-and-coming iPhone application called Ben from Benjamin Moore. Well, Ben is here and I've been using it since yesterday. Prior to Ben's arrival, Sherwin-Williams came up with a color-selecting app of their own called ColorSnap.

I've been playing with ColorSnap for about a week and here's my two cents about Sherwin-Williams' first dive into the iPhone pool. I'll review Ben tomorrow.

When you launch ColorSnap, it loads pretty quickly and flashes through a short series of photographs matched with a Sherwin-Williams color. The home screen arrives shortly thereafter and it's ready for action.

There are two buttons on the home page, Camera and Library. Library will take you to the photos you've already loaded onto your phone and Camera launches the iPhone's camera. I can't imagine how that could be made any simpler.

So say you have an aerial view of a Bahamian beach loaded onto your phone and you want to come up with a color scheme based on the photo. ColorSnap opens a copy of your archived photo. Once it's been imported, you can zoom and crop the image how you'd like. The you point to (literally) whatever color you'd like to have matched. It takes a second or two, but ColorSnap will pull the closest Sherwin-Williams color it can find and match it to your photo. In the photo above, the cursor was placed somewhere over the water and ColorSnap matched it with SW6516, Down Pour. If you agree with the match, then ColorSnap will assemble a three-color palette based on the first color it matched. The three-color palette is automatic and you can't control the secondary or tertiary colors in the palette. Hmmm.

If you click on any of the colors in the sample palette, ColorSnap jumps to a screen with the RGB formulas for the three colors in the palette. Considering RGB is the color system used for video and web color, I don't understand why RGB since we're talking about paint. I don't care about Red, Green and Blue light when I'm thinking about paint. When it comes to paint I want to see a pigment formula. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

With all of that said, once you get to a three-color palette you like, you can save it to a collection.

Once saved, you can come back to your collection whenever you'd like.

The final function ColorSnap is Find Store. Find Store uses the iPhone's GPS to locate the closest Sherwin-Williams location to wherever you are. This function works perfectly and that's more than I can say for the rest of the app unfortunately.

In ColorSnap's defense, the Capture function is limited by the fact that it's relying on a camera in a phone. The app does a better job with the Library function. As a test, I took a photo of an actual Sherwin-Williams color swatch and tried to get ColorSnap to identify it. The app failed miserably. Again, that is as much the fault of the camera as it is the app. However, if it can't recognize one of its own colors, how would it do if I were trying to coordinate a room color with a carpet or a tile? This is an app that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

I get the feeling from using ColorSnap that design professionals are not the target audience for this app. I mean, I don't need a color specifying tool that automatically assigns three-color palettes. I doubt I'll be whipping this app out when I'm in a quandary about how to paint a room. Although it will make my nieces and nephews ooh and ahh.

Even so, it's a pretty interesting first attempt. Sherwin-Williams was the first paint company to get a specifying tool into the app store. This application is the first step down a long road that's going to change everything we know about everything. But that's just the early adopter in me speaking. If they decide to develop it into something meaningful, this is a good first step. For now though, ColorSnap is interesting for what it represents more than for what it can do. You can download ColorSnap on Sherwin-Williams' website or you can find it in the App Store on iTunes.

Enter to win a design classic from All Modern

So even though my Bertoia stools aren't going to happen, my pals at All Modern still like me. So much so that they want to do a give away with Kitchen and Residential Design. Here it is:

This is Michael Graves' 9093 Kettle (the big one) and this is what we're giving away.

Michael Graves' New Americana collection for Alessi from 1985 grew out of his dissatisfaction with Modernist expression. In a series of experiments to help him find a newer design vocabulary, he turned a Postmodernist eye to every day objects. His New Americana collection was an over night sensation and it brought the work of an already-famous architect and product designer into the homes of people worldwide.

Graves' pairing his iconographic sensibilities with Alessi is a perfect match. Alessi's entire raison d’être is to re-imagine every day objects. Graves' career is marked by his embrace of a studied whimsy and I love him for it. That same studied whimsy is at the root of my passion for all things Alessi too. I'm pretty thrilled to have the chance to bring some of the serious fun into someone else's life through this give away.

All Modern carries most of Alessi's collections by the way, so give them a look-see. Alessi proves that Modern design can be both a serious art form and a whole lot of fun.

So it's pretty simple. All you need to do is leave a comment after this post and I'll draw a winner at random next Sunday, 14 June. There aren't any magic words to repeat or assignments to complete for this one. All I'm looking for is a comment. Good luck!

All modern from All Modern

It's my job to echo and interpret the design sensibilities of my clients. Because of that, I spend a lot of time putting together rooms that aren't really my style. Don't get me wrong, I put together some great rooms but I generally don't work on spaces that would make me happy personally. That's fine and as it should be, people don't pay me to recreate my dream home.

With that said, every once in a while I get to work on a project that does appeal to me personally and I'm working on one right now. The clients in question have a good-humored approach to life and to their home and they appreciate modern design. These people a find and it's an honor to work on their home.

Pretty early into the process, I specified four Bertoia counter stools that were supposed to go with a rather large bar I had in mind for the back of a particularly large island. Here are the Bertoia counter stools I was lobbying for.

These Bertoias are part of a collection of similar seating designed by Italian sculptor Harry Bertoia in 1952. This collection was designed for Knoll originally and Knoll still makes the same collection. The Knoll Company was founded in 1938 by Hans and Florence Knoll and it's still making 20th century originals.

Mies van der Rohe, Florence Knoll, Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Marcel Breuer and of course Harry Bertoia had and have collections produced by the modern masters at Knoll. Looking though their catalogs is like a stroll through the 20th century. World War II was a lot more destructive socially than most people think and in the years during and immediately after it, everything was up for grabs. In a lot of ways, Modernism was a reaction to the social upheavals of that terrible conflict.

Modernism came about alongside the rise of the middle class in the West and the two forces fed and sustained one another. Modernist designers were committed to getting designed furnishings into the hands of the masses and the masses could suddenly afford it. Companies like Knoll bridged that gap then and continue to do so now.

So let's get back to my clients. When the time came to order the Bertoia counter stools I had my heart set on, my clients balked. They have kids, young pre-teens, and they didn't want to spend the money on furniture that was going to get kicked around by a room full of 10-year-old boys. They're going for a cheap knock off instead. Ugh. My first impulse is to tell them to get the good stuff and just tell the kids they're not allowed to sit on them until they're older. Can you tell I don't have any kids? Hah! But I let it go. They did however, sign off on this amazing light fixture by Sonneman.

I love this light fixture enough to make up for the missing Bertoias in this finished room. Almost.

So had we gone ahead with the Bertoias, they would have come from Boston-based All Modern. All Modern has the full Knoll Collection and they offer free, same day shipping on select Knoll items. All Modern carries all of the greats who make up the entire Modernist movement. Herman Miller, Steelcase, Luce Plan, Louis Poulsen, Hansgrohe, George Kovacs, Droog, Artemide, Artecnica, Kartell and my beloved Alessi swell that website to the point of near bursting. Got an ache for some modernism? Scratch it at All Modern.

Artifacts from a nuclear past (and present)

The Radon stories I wrote last week were a great deal of fun to work on. I learned so much and I'm forever grateful for my personal physicist and editor Chris. I did a lot of research independently prior to meeting Chris and one of the real finds from my digging around was the Home page of the Health Physics Instrumentation Collection.

Health Physics is a field of study that concerns itself with the proper uses of radioactivity in healthcare, industry and in homes. The HPIC is the project of Dr. Paul Frame, a Health Physicist at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

Frame's work is a museum and library of the history of his field and I found him through his collection of Radioactive Quack Cures. It was this collection where I found the Radon Suppositories here.

These quackeries don't come from some dark and gloomy past, they are all 20th century inventions and products. Some are available even now. I'm fascinated by this stuff and these radioactive quack cures share an alarming similarity with the quack cures being peddled today. Whether its detoxing diets, colon cleanses, the anti-vaccination movement, ionizing air filters or homeopathy; all of this quackery takes a scientific idea, turns it on its ear and then sells it to a gullible public. I think these things prey on many peoples' deep-seated fear of death and their wish for a quick fix and an easy answer. As anybody with any sense knows though, there aren't any quick fixes and there are even fewer easy answers.

Anyhow, check out these beauties.

This is the Radium Vitalizer Health Font (ca. 1925-30) and it was intended to be used to add Radium to drinking water. Radium-infused drinking water had all kinds of benefits attributed to it and before you laugh too hard, put down that bottle of anti-oxident-infused water in your hand. Interestingly, the glass this water fountain is made from is vaseline glass, and it got its green color from the addition of Uranium to molten glass. Vaseline glass is no longer manufactured, though you can still find in in antique stores. The Uranium in the glass isn't where the Radium Vitalizer Health Font got its oomph though, it got it from a Radium Emanator which is missing from this example.

Here's a Radium Emanator from the same era. This Emanator is made from cement mixed with Uranium ore. A Radium Emanator was intended to be submerged in drinking water in order to energize it for drinking.

This is a tube of World War II-era radioactive toothpaste. It contains trace amounts of Thorium and promised "Radioactively Bright Teeth!"

This is a Nicotine Alkaloid Control Plate. It's a metal plate with a Uranium ore coating on one . It's about the size of a credit card. It's also from 1990, believe it or not. These NACPs were intended to be inserted into a pack of cigarettes to render them safer. They were never sold in the US, but the amount of radioactivity it cranks out is small enough that it could have been.

This is a refrigerator deodorizer from 1983 and it contains a form of Thorium that will remain radioactive for the next ten billion years. 20,000 of these were sold and distributed in the US until the Nuclear Regulatory Agency shut down the importer behind them.

This is a Radium pillow filled with low-grade Uranium ore. It was made and sold in the US and was still available as 2004.

This is my personal favorite. This machine was called a Shoe Fitting Fluoroscope and was a common fixture in shoe stores in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Believe it or not, this is an x-ray machine used as a gimmick to fit shoes. There was an x-ray tube in the base of the unit. The customer would put his or her foot in the hole at the base shown and then the salesman (or concerned parent) could see the x-rayed bones of the foot through the viewer a the top of the unit. There were 10,000 of these machines sold and used in the US alone.

Thank you Dr. Paul Frame for this collection, and thanks for the chance to see that the past doesn't have a lock on crazy.