Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:54:31 +0000

With the chalkboard wall complete and the art hung, I can now move on to another project in the Home Office Redesign. The cabinet in the room will provide a lot of storage, but there also needs to be a place to stack magazines, books and various other items. I had considered bringing in a bookcase, but this little animal table needs to stay in the room. If I put a bookcase on this wall there wouldn't be a space left to place the table, a item my husband purchased long before I knew him. (And I'm not saying I don't like it, I actually do...)


The solution? Hang three ledges on the wall above the animal table to provide the needed shelving. Ikea sells the Lack wall shelf shown above. They were my first choice: right size, right color and very very affordable. The problem? The maximum weight for each shelf is just 33 pounds. I took a small stack of magazines and weighed them...10 pounds! That was a surprise. Well, that isn't going to work, these shelves need to hold a lot of weight should the magazines and books pile up.


There are endless shelf and ledge options on the market right now. But the ones I finally selected are the Holman Shelves from Pottery Barn. They are available in the four foot length perfect for this wall, are the right width with a lip to stop items from slipping off, the black color coordinates with the other finishes in the room, and the deciding factor? Each shelf can hold up to 70 pounds. So while this style comes with a higher price tag, because they provide all the required function the cost is worth it.


To get the shelves hung I decided to indicate the position of each shelf with tape. I went to the bin in the closet where I store all my tape, including the painters tape I wanted to use, and guess what? No blue tape, not even any Frog tape. I had some there, I know I did. Do you ever have this problem in your house? Oh well, luckily there was a roll of duct tape. That ought to work, add it to the list.


Three four foot lengths of tape were cut and I played around with the placement on the wall. The height of items to be placed on the shelves and the maximum height the top shelf could be hung were taken into consideration. My husband is tall, but still, I wanted to make sure the items placed there could be reached.


This is the arrangement I decided on, I think it is going to work...check back tomorrow to see!

p.s. If you've read this blog for awhile you might remember my saying if you want to see a space with fresh eyes take a photo, you'll see things you don't see looking at the space in person. What do I see looking at photos of this room? I see I need to paint the little patch on the ceiling, a repair from a popped nail. In person you don't even notice it. It really does work!

There are important details in an office design that can affect any company’s performance. These details can make a company be a success or a failure.

There are key elements that need to be examined in any office redesign and that is the amount of needed space, company goals, and the input of the worker. Sometimes it is important to hire an outside professional designer to do the job, but a lot of time the company can accomplish it themselves.

How increase staff’s morale and productivity became many big corporations priority. Bad office layouts are a thing of the past.

Office spaces are all different. Some offices are too tight, dark, and sad.

Employers are realizing that to be efficient companies need to keep their workers happy, but with bad environments, it will be difficult. An office manager or owner needs to decide on what is the correct solution to the problem of office design and then decide how to proceed to correct it.

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader.

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:54:15 +0000

All businesses no matter what the nature and their target audience, need something besides their product or service to increase their market value and promulgate distinguishable brand recognition. For that they need to do something that can flower up their image presentation in the market. Now although it’s more inclined towards the advertising sphere, yet graphic designing is something that has proved instrumental in offering an identity to someone or some unit through a graphical representation. Whether it’s about designing the layout of a company website, designing its logo, designing flyers or simply designing a business card, the graphic designing arena has far exceeded its expectations.

According to the market trends it is graphic designing that has been contributing majorly to the growth of a company, although its line of progress is over the soft promotion department. In other words, graphic designing simply gives companies a unique identity, and a strong one at that, that can captivate the audience instantaneously with its conceptual clarity and creative gesture. But for that you need to hire the services of a professional graphic design firm that has the right amount of exposure and experience in the market to take your business higher. And from what can be seen today, there is no dearth of such agencies as a great number of companies are setting their cash registers ringing through some highly creative graphic designs.

But making huge profits in the market is also about choosing the right graphic design agency that can work wonders for you. And the right graphic design firm for you would be one that has a fair deal of experience and reputation in the market coupled with designers who have the ability to understand your business module clearly and bring them to life in the most creative manner. For that a close collaboration between the client and the designers is necessary so they can understand each other better and arrive at a consensus that works for both the parties – the company getting what they desired and the designers getting a creative stimulation from the task.

We are a very large and well established Real Estate firm located in midtown,Manhattan – We are actively looking for PowerPoint Presentation Designers for our Marketing department.

Our department works on both PC and MAC platforms and need someone with the following software skills:

PowerPoint

InDesign

Photoshop

Illustrator

We also create Presentations with a strong sense of DESIGN since most of our clients are in Real Estate so the proper candidate should be able to dress professionally and have many if not multiple skills using CS4 in conjunction with PowerPoint – If you have previous Real Estate MARKETING or DESIGN skills that is a big plus

To apply, send us your WORD resume in an attachment and indicate your hourly rate for your services

We are looking forward to interviewing potential candidates as soon as mid week for this on-site position within our marketing department

Tracey Knight

Marketing Coordinator

Tagged as: Estate, Mac, Manhattan, marketing, PowerPoint, Real

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:54:03 +0000

On Wednesday, February 24th 2010, the first ever German Town Hall Meeting was held in Berlin with over 120 guests. It was an evening intended to introduce the Designers Accord, share projects, and discuss initiatives. Thanks to writers Philipp Züllich & Christine-Maria Kittner for the recap and Saskia Nagel for providing the photos.

The International Design Center Berlin was an ideal venue for the Town Hall. It’s a non-profit organization that was founded more than 40 years ago, in the back then divided city. It has long since emphasized topical issues and social questions in design.

Cornelia Horsch, Director of the IDZ, welcomed the guests to an evening that brought together “many unknown ingredients,” and suggested that the outcome would be “a tasty dish.” Philipp Züllich followed with a Designers Accord introduction.

Florian Sametinger, a Munich-based interaction designer and Ronen Kadushin, Israeli-born designer and Berliner-by-choice who adopted the Designers Accord guidelines, gave lectures on their approach to sustainability. Stephan Bohle, managing partner of futurestrategy, a sustainable marketing and brand management firm, kicked off the lectures that night by provocatively claiming that “designers are guilty of killing our planet.” His lecture titled “There is a pig in every designer!” offered insight to how designers fuel mass consumption by supporting various industries that throw millions of products into the market every year. 90% of them are taken off the market again within one year because products either go out of style or are not profitable enough. Bohle claimed that designers should mediate between humans and nature to achieve as much as they can with as little complexity as possible. Naturally, Bohle had best-practice examples up his sleeve illustrating how designers can do better. He introduced Better Place, an Israeli company working to redefine the way people consider and use personal transportation. He also explained Pee Poo, a throw-away toilet in the shape of a bag that offers a solution for 2.6 billion people globally who currently live without access to toilets. Lastly, Bohle mentioned “Make it Right,” a project initiated by Hollywood-Star Brad Pitt helping to rebuild New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward using state-of-the-art sustainable architecture.

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Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology
$5.5
<p>List of Abbreviations</p><p>1. An Irresistible Analogy<br /><br />2. The Trouble with Intellectual Property in Biotechnology<br /><br />3. Intellectual Property and Innovation<br /><br />4. Welcome to the Bazaar<br /><br />5. Open Source Licensing for Biotechnology<br /><br />6. Foundations of the Biobazaar<br /><br />7. Financing Open Source Biotechnology<br /><br />8. Biotechnology's Open Source Revolution</p><p>Notes<br /><br />References<br /><br />Acknowledgments<br /><br />Index</p><i>Biobazaar</i> is the first book dedicated to studying current efforts at open biological innovation. It is a well-researched and thoughtful analysis of the great potential that such innovation holds for improving the ways we address some of our most basic human needs.Can an open-source-style economy in life sciences change the landscape of innovation, and for the better? Hope provides a much-needed, reasoned guide to thinking through that critical question.<p>Fighting disease, combating hunger, preserving the balance of life on Earth: the future of biotechnological innovation may well be the future of our planet itself. And yet the vexed state of intellectual property law--a proliferation of ever more complex rights governing research and development--is complicating this future. At a similar point in the development of information technology, open source software revolutionized the field, simultaneously encouraging innovation and transforming markets. The question that Janet Hope explores in <i>Biobazaar</i> is: can the open source approach do for biotechnology what it has done for information technology? Her book is the first sustained and systematic inquiry into the application of open source principles to the life sciences.</p><p>The appeal of the open source approach--famous@