So, I've been playing Design Home a lot lately, because one of my coping mechanisms is displacement organizing, and this game is extremely good for that. And part of it is, of course, a/b voting on other people's designs. Observing my own voting inclinations, and trialing them in my own rooms, I have come up with the following rules of in-game design, and figured they might entertain.

Commit to the Bit

All the elements of a space need to work together. An geometric blue print mixed in among blue flowered print of a different shade is going to be jarring. Filling one of the game's wildly ornate "French" rooms (it's Rococo, just call it that, omg) with square, plain furniture is unlikely to hit voters' "yes, correct" reflex. If the accessory set of the month is bright orange, then by god, get that glowingly orange couch and click that sucker in there. That said...

Contrast is Good

Black furniture will not stand out well against a black room. If you have a room in neutrals, use colored furniture. If you have a room with an intense accent color wall, put a neutral against it. This is not to say low-contrast palettes can't work very well; but things have to stand out well enough to be seen.

Fill the Space

A room needs to be comfortably filled out. If it's a big room with just a love-seat and a desk chair in it, it looks like that terrible stage of moving in when you're there with just the things you could cram into your car because the moving van hasn't arrived yet. It's certainly possible to over-stuff a room, but I much more often see rooms that are way too sparse.


These are the things I find myself voting based on, and they've been good guidelines to winding up with a good-looking room. Even if I feel a little dirty about it, when it's one of the Rococo rooms.

I like this one.

Day 8: What is your philosophy on journal layouts?

I have a couple different ones for different purposes.

1) You can have as eye burning a layout as you like, just as long as I am not required to read in it! I will even make layouts in colors I would never, ever use myself, because it's only fair really, but I don't want it inflicted on my retina when I go to read your stuff. This is a big reason I less-than-three Dreamwidth forever. That setting that lets me view all cuts and links in my own style? Brilliant.

2) The geometry of layouts I design will always be fairly simple and have a fair bit of elbow room between components. This is just me, that's what triggers my "yes, that looks good" response, so that's what I create.

3) What I, personally, like includes: black on white reading space! I am really not good with even lightly tinted reading backgrounds or text. This is a text journal, not a photo journal, I want to be able to read walls o' text easily. This does not, however, mean that the frames and backgrounds and sidebars can't be colored, because I actually prefer that; it sets off the text space nicely and makes the whole thing pretty.

If you infer by all this design-thought that I am currently in the middle of a bout of design-madness, you would be right. It's /way/ more fun than grading the stack of papers that's due to land on my desk tonight.