A Life in the Clouds

Tag clouds, that is. It all started at Powell's (as so many of the best stories begin), when I snatched Domino Decorating Room-by-Room off the shelf. Step number 2 of the Getting Started chapter suggested you ponder for a moment just exactly what your design style is. It kindly gave you permission to be a blending between different styles, and had something like a tag cloud on the bottom of the page with various descriptives like "traditional," "elegant," "sentimental," "punk." It gave me the enormously charming idea of seeing my own personal preferences in a similar style - I could barely wait to explore myself! Ego-centrism aside, tag clouds really are clever little beasts. It's such a clear and visual way to express what can be a little hard to nail down sometimes. We all know we change over time, but if you have only a vague idea of what you enjoy about an aesthetic, you can run into some pretty practical problems in the here-and-now. For instance, If you don't realize that you have a severe allergy to traditional, you face either fleeing in terror from such stores (potentially missing a great find buried somewhere amongst the damask and tassels) or you might end up in a depressed puddle in the middle of the showroom floor, surrounded by a sea of perfectly matching, symmetrically arranged livingroom sets. Vowing never to meddle with "interior design" again, you could even backlash into biggie sizing a McDonald's quarter-pounder and picking up some particle board on the way home. The stakes are high, my friend.

Fortunately, my instincts had encouraged me to stockpile digital pictures of rooms that I liked, putting me a long way down the road for my project. Next step was to flip through these pictures, and in a little text window, type out a few words to describe what I liked about them. Is it clean, bright, airy and inviting? Dark, dramatic and intimate? Modern? Vintage?? COZY?? You get the idea. Do this for every room, even if you just end up repeating your words (perhaps especially if you repeat your words). Next comes the fun part: find a tag-cloud-generating website (I used wordle for the ability to tweak the style of the tag cloud and not at all because it has a cute name), paste in everything you typed out, and voila! It makes words that appear more often in your list larger, letting you see the landscape of what seems to be most important to you.

Some pretty interesting things came out for me. It was pretty easy to tell even writing out the words that some of them were popping up pretty often, but what was cool to me was how the pattern shifted if I was looking at a bedroom or a den, rather than a kitchen or living room. Once I started noticing that, I decided I'd do one tag cloud for "public" rooms, one for the more personal rooms, and another for all of them together. A veritable thunderhead of self expression. Hahahah! hehe. Having them all lined up was pretty interesting. Even though both types of rooms had more or less the same words, the emphasis seemed to almost completely reverse itself. Neat. Without further ado, here they all are (cleverly, though inadvertently, demonstrating my inconsistent use of style):

(public rooms)	(private rooms)
(overall)

Joking aside, it actually is pretty helpful for me to see this laid out. I suppose I could have guessed that I like things that bring the outside in, things that feel fresh, maybe a little dash of contemporary - but seeing this really made it concrete for me that rooms that I really feel drawn to are heavy on the natural, organic and friendly side. Going overboard on some of the other things, like contemporary or dramatic, may be fun for a moment, but might not end up being something I'd really feel at home in without it being softened and relaxed a bit.

Such happy little clouds of positivity deserve one little burst of negativity, eh? Exactly. So while I wrote down words about rooms I liked, I also wrote down words describing rooms that I hated (flipping through the book gave plenty examples of both). Behold! My hate-cloud!


(patterny: technical term for lots of jumbled
random patterns on textiles)

In this day and age giant rifts in relationships have been started over far less, so I suppose I should put a disclaimer down about my little storm cloud. It's not that I necessarily completely hate these kinds of styles and perspectives, it seems to fit other people and their homes and I find them quite intriguing rooms to visit. In a very hands-off no-mirth-please sort of way, but in a way none the less - like visiting a city you find fascinating but would never want to live in.

I hope that this trip into the clouds prompts all of the rest of you to go out and make your own, be they related to design, food, movies, love letters, hate mail - be creative! I wonder if one day I could credit myself with starting a tag-cloud fad. The Cumulus Craze, they might call it. Sky's the limit really.