Annaleena’s Hem

Annaleena’s Hem recently published a whimsical “inspiration” wall, a styled visualization of a very practical process. She taped up clipped-from-magazine images of ideas for redecorating, and called it “Collect Your Dreams”.  Says Annaleena:

Something I often say to…those who are renovating is to tear out pictures as you like, it can be inspirational images of colors, chairs, wallpaper samples or materials and place them in a binder. Then you have a frame to go to when all is said and done and you have to make choices.

We’ve recommended doing that very thing ourselves in past posts, though we’ve shifted our “notebook” largely from paper to virtual. Since we’re always scouting blogs and websites for ‘the improvised life’, we come across tons of visual ideas for our dream renovation. We just slide them into Evernote, a free software with which you can clip images, write notes to yourself, organize them any way we like, moving things around at will. (You can also sync it between computers and with your iPhone. When we’re out in the world, we sometimes take pictures of cool ideas with our iPhone, and send it to our Evernote).  Here’s a couple of screen shots from our Renovation Notebook:

The file of storage ideas is HUGE; we just scroll down to look at the pictures…

…ideas for dealing with a low ceiling include a ceiling of round disk, and one done high gloss for reflection….

One of these days we hope to have a place to try our ideas out!

Related post: ted muehling and the inspiration journal

more on inspiration and other visual journals + scrapbooks

the beauty of black masking tape

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3 replies on “inspiration journals: walls, books, software…

  1. I’m a maniacal user of Evernote as well. I have often wished for a third level of categorization, as I tend to make a new note for each new “inspiration”, making for a lot of individual “notes”. It looks as if you solved this by using the “notes” as subcategories (“storage”, “floor plans”) and then adding new stuff into existing notes, making for a collection of fewer, but much larger notes. Hmmm. Doesn’t that slow down the process of adding things – having to stop and find the right place for each thing? The other free amazing software that I love is Dropbox; I tend to use that more for graphic stuff.

    Hope you will post more on this subject. I collect inspiration in a zillion categories and am never completely sure how best to deal with it all. At least it’s better than the decades of PAPER inspiration – recipes, scrapbooks, etc… or is it?

  2. I find that with just about any software, you have to be bold about customizing it to your needs, no matter how they tell you it’s supposed to be used. (I’ve just been “hacking” the crazily complex but useful OmniFocus with my assistant, to tailor it – simplify it – to our needs. I hope to post about it at some point). In Evernote, my notes are pretty specific subcategories and even though they are large and full of pictures, I can scroll throw them really fast for a great mash-up of ideas on a theme.

    And as for Dropbox, I couldn’t live without it as it syncs with the 3 computers I use + my iPhone, and keeps everything backed up.

  3. I find that I can only write in Evernote these days: the simple box with no editing controls just sucks me in. And it’s a great place to store poems that I can read later on my phone while hanging out waiting for people. It’s truly amazing software in its simplicity. But I, too, would love multilevel categories in Evernote.

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