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In her best-selling book, Living Well By Design, Melissa Penfold addressed the basics of interior decorating.  Now she turns her attention to demonstrating what a powerful force design can be in boosting our physical and emotional well-being in her newest book, ‘Natural Living By Design’, Vendome Press, launches in April and available for Preorder now,  Continue Reading The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? appeared first on Melissa Penfold.
a month ago

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More from Melissa Penfold

20 Interior Design Trends That Will Define 2025

Among the predictions in the annual decor trend report: Sprawling sectional sofas will yield to tidier seating, pastel hues to rich earthy shades. Oh, and…make way for murals. There will be a greater sense of playfulness and a push towards individualism. Limited budgets and a desire to move away from homogeneous high-street collections will meanContinue Reading The post 20 Interior Design Trends That Will Define 2025 first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post 20 Interior Design Trends That Will Define 2025 appeared first on Melissa Penfold.

a month ago 19 votes
THE MOST DEFINING PIECES OF FURNITURE FROM THE LAST 100 YEARS

How do we define furniture? It might seem like a silly question, but it’s one that kept coming up in October of last year, when, in a conference room on the 15th floor of The New York Times building, six experts — the architects and interior designers Rafael de Cárdenas and Daniel Romualdez; the Museum of Modern Art’sContinue Reading The post THE MOST DEFINING PIECES OF FURNITURE FROM THE LAST 100 YEARS first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post THE MOST DEFINING PIECES OF FURNITURE FROM THE LAST 100 YEARS appeared first on Melissa Penfold.

2 months ago 39 votes
THE THINGS YOUR WEDDING GUESTS SECRETLY DESPISE

There’s a fairly well-established list of the things that wedding guests detest. Overly long ceremonies. Overly long toasts. Cash bars. A bachelor or bachelorette trip that sends its attendees into credit-card debt. A destination wedding in a remote locale that the couple has zero relationship to and that plunges its guests into further bankruptcy. But what about allContinue Reading The post THE THINGS YOUR WEDDING GUESTS SECRETLY DESPISE first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post THE THINGS YOUR WEDDING GUESTS SECRETLY DESPISE appeared first on Melissa Penfold.

2 months ago 41 votes
THE MOST THOUGHTFUL GIFTS THAT NO ONE ELSE WILL GIVE

We’re always here to help you find gifts that elicit “you really know me!” enthusiasm, even from the normally taciturn. This year, we aimed higher, aspiring to choose items with such eternal appeal, and of such high quality, that some might become heirlooms—used and loved by both your giftees and subsequent generations. Find our updated,Continue Reading The post THE MOST THOUGHTFUL GIFTS THAT NO ONE ELSE WILL GIVE first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post THE MOST THOUGHTFUL GIFTS THAT NO ONE ELSE WILL GIVE appeared first on Melissa Penfold.

4 months ago 32 votes

More in design

Flow State and Surfing

Jack Johnson is on Rick Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton talking about music, film making, creativity, and surfing. At one point (~24:30) Johnson talks about his love for surfing and the beautiful flow state it puts him in: Sometimes I’ll see a friend riding a wave while I’m paddling out, and the thing I’ll see them do just seems like magic...I’ll think, “How in the world did they just do that?” And then on your next ride you’re doing the exact same thing without thinking but it’s all muscle memory and it’s all in this flow that you get into. That’s a really beautiful state to get into, to do something that feels like a magic trick, like something you shouldn’t be able to do, but all of the sudden you’re doing it. I’m not a surfer, and I can’t do effortlessly cool. But I know what a flow state feels like. Johnson’s description reminds me of that feeling when you get a little time on a personal project — riding the wave of working on your personal website. You open your laptop. You start paddling out. Maybe you see an internet friend who was doing something cool and you want to try it but you have no idea if you’ll be able to do it as well as they did. And before you know it, you’re in that flow state where muscle memory takes over and you’re doing stuff without even consciously thinking about it — stuff that others might look at and perceive as magic (cough anything on the command line cough) but it’s not magic to you. Intuition and experience just take over while you ride the wave. Ok, I’m a nerd. But I don’t care. It’s a great feeling, regardless of whether it’s playing an instrument, or surfing, or programming. That feeling of sinking into a craft you’ve worked at your whole life that you don’t have to think about anymore. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

an hour ago 1 votes
Bidfood Pizza Academy by mode:lina

Bidfood Pizza Academy in Wrocław, designed by mode:lina™ studio, is a space dedicated to training and culinary workshops, where Italian...

7 hours ago 1 votes
UX or PX? Why naming matters

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

2 days ago 5 votes
House of Olives by ARHINGinženjering

House of Olives is a building intended for the Association of Olive Growers of Montenegro as an administrative and educational...

2 days ago 3 votes
Don’t Forget the Meta Theme-Color Tag

Ever used a website where you toggle from light mode to dark mode and the web site changes but the chrome around the browser doesn’t? To illustrate, take a look at this capture of my blog on an iPhone. When you toggle the theme from light to dark, note how the website turns white but status bar stays black. Only once I refresh the page or navigate does the status bar then turn white. When the user changes the theme on my site, I want it to propagate all the way to the surrounding context of the browser. In this case, to the status bar on the iPhone. Like this: There we go! That’s what I want. So what was wrong? A popular way to indicate the active theme is to put a class on the root of the document, e.g. <html class="dark"> <style> html { background: white } html.dark { background: black } </style> </html> Then we simply add/remove the dark class when the user toggles the theme. But that will only change the in-page styles. It won’t tell the browser to update the color of whatever ambient user interface elements its drawing. For that, you’ll need the meta theme-color tag: The theme-color value for the name attribute of the <meta> element indicates a suggested color that user agents should use to customize the display of the page or of the surrounding user interface. So when you respond to the user changing their theme, don’t forget to update the <meta name='theme-color'> tag in addition to whatever you do to modify the in-page styles. That’ll give you the effect you want in the surrounding browser UI (for browsers that support it). Oh, and it’s worth pointing out: don’t forget the color-scheme property either. That’s what will tell the browser to update other in-page UI elements it draws. So, when responding to a user preference to update a website’s theme: Toggle some global attribute that triggers style changes for all your custom, in-page elements. Set the color-scheme property so the browser draws the things its responsible for correctly (form controls, scroll bars, etc.). Set the <meta name='theme-color'> value appropriately so contextual browser UI can adapt to your site’s styles. I wrote this post as a friendly reminder, because friends don’t let friends forget the meta theme-color tag. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

3 days ago 5 votes