Finding Your Style

Now that we’ve started to define qualities you like, and your personal tastes, what we need to do next is to create your “design portfolio.” Yes, you’ve got some homework to do. Get a two-inch binder with pockets, tab dividers, and a number of sheet protectors. Put a few pages of loose-leaf notebook paper inside it, for writing down notes. Your goal is to shape and build your personal style. With this in mind, you must consciously start to keep your radar on at all times for sources of inspiration, as you set out to identify and articulate your design style more specifically. 

Look for inspiration everywhere! You are looking for what you like—and taking notes about that—but you are also cataloging your dislikes as well. Believe it or not, most people discover what they don’t like before they realize fully what they do like.

Rip and tear pages from magazines, books, and catalogs. The pages may include colors you like, styles of furniture, and prints on fabric. Look for and collect pictures of art that appeals to you, tile designs for bathroom walls, hand-drawn sketches, photos of arched, vaulted ceilings in entryways—anything that strikes your fancy.

When you’re traveling, it’s important to stop and take time to jot down or otherwise document any ideas that hit you, before you forget them. Take photos on the fly with your camera phone. Capture images of things and places you love, and print them out. Begin to organize your clippings and photos, images and notes, in inspirational design files that are sorted and identified. For example, you could file all of your material in separate folders labeled “Outdoors,” “Indoors,” or “Style Don’ts.”

After you get a healthy assortment in each file, it’s time to pull it all together and review everything. Viewing all of your inspirations as a whole, we should be able to get a solid sense of your design style. And there it is!

Allow your explorative research into your tastes and style to happen with no time pressures. It’s not something you can do overnight—Rome wasn’t built in a day. Give yourself time, over days or months or even years, to discover your inner design diva, and get to know your design style. Allow that style to change and grow, as you change and grow. Design can become a way of looking at the world, and a way of life. I know.