Social media advocacy marketing just doesn’t work for design firms. The content being posted is just too subtle, or too confidential, and the stakes far too high. After all, what employee of an architectural firm in his right mind would risk blogging, sharing, tweeting or posting about a project voluntarily on his own Facebook page, or Twitter account? It’s…
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Where designers go for antiques
by Louis Postel, first published in New England Home / Connecticut | November, 2016 How do you separate the super serious designer from the merely serious? Had you been at the opening of the R.T. Facts Gallery on 8 Barns Road in Kent, CT one Saturday night in June, the difference between super serious and serious would have been as…
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Beauty and the Beasts: Exploring the Art and Architecture of Estate Agriculture
By Louis Postel, as seen in New England Home, Special Spaces, November 2016 If you close your eyes and listen to the clip-clop of a great steed being led across the cobblestone courtyard with a three-spouted fountain playing counterpoint into a cistern behind, it’s easy to imagine yourself reincarnated as one of those riders born to royalty you read about…
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Today’s Design Tack
by Louis Postel | Trade Secrets | first published in New England Home, November 2016 “Are you calling about the Olympics?” asked designer Lynne Shore of Rhode Island Kitchen and Bath in Newport, RI. “So many reporters have been calling. It turns out the state of Rhode Island wants to give all its Olympic medalists special license plates, and there’s…
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How Low Can You Go? | Showboats International
by Louis Postel Coffee tables just slightly elevated from the floor endure a bad rap for being hazardous to your health. Strategically deployed to trip you up, or whack you on the shin, they’re blamed for contributing to yet one more surface for collecting clutter. But Low tables may also contribute to world peace, at least in that bit of…
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What Can Design Do, Really? | New England Home
by Louis Postel | Trade Secrets in New England Home| August 2016 Newton, MA-based architect and artist Lisa Reindorf and her partner Mitchell Goldman of Goldman Reindorf Architects have been consulting on a new film called Cortex with Josh Lucas premiering next year. Does not such a project point to the future of design itself, how the neurons and synapses…
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How Does She Do It
by Louis Postel, originally published in New England Home | August 2016: In Our Backyard The eye moves up the curtain in search of where its pattern repeats. Finding repeats becomes a kind of game. Where to find the next line of peacocks, trellises, and inky down strokes? – It’s a visual game that can become a needless distraction.…
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High Meets Low in Monaco
by Louis Postel in Showboats International, September 2016 Princess Grace Designer George Stacey Who invented who took two seemingly irreconcilable ideas — casual and chic — and put them together to revolutionize the interior décor and furnishings? Arguably, it was George Alford Stacey (1901-1993) who decorated five homes over 28 years for Monaco’s patron saint, Princess Grace, including the Palais…
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Why Can’t We All Have 100 Acres?
Liliane Wong runs the Interior Architecture Department at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence where she has been teaching since 1998. Though there’s no apparent connection between her early interest in pure mathematics and what she does now, it’s not hard to imagine one. “I was interested in describing the changing shapes of clouds as they moved through…
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Through the Looking Glass
Trade Secrets by Louis Postel, first published in New England Home, July 2016 Transparency. Transparency. Transparency. Now, more than ever, we want to know what’s going on. Not the appearance of what’s going on, but what’s really going on. Transparency, after all, is the stock in trade of the design profession: the play of light and shadow, windows and walls.…
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Uncollected Fees in Philadelphia
Dear Louis: Did you go to the AIA Conference in Philadelphia this year, and if so how was it? Our firm was all set to go but ultimately we had to cancel because someone snatched the zero-energy condo we wanted on VRBO. Jerk — not you Louis, him! Needless to say, I remain your most devoted fan at Fat Daddy’s…
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Publish My Project!
Dear Louis: I’m feeling pretty down about a snafu here in our design studio, and I am hoping you can help me out. Eighty-six days ago exactly – I counted – we sent photos of a zero energy, a shingle-style project we did to glossy Magazine X, hoping to get it published. Despite our follow up calls and ever-so-polite inquiries,…
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Welcome to the New New England
Wealthy people from abroad, high-tech entrepreneurs, thousands of moneyed folk are discovering New England: its frothy mix of culture and clam chowder. Not only are they discovering, they are settling in – buying up houses, condos and pied a terres, recharging that culture as they go. Designers and architects are adapting. The design vocabulary of new money’s characteristically baroque, artistic-leaning…
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Low Engagement
Why this column on marketing your firm and your projects through social media? We’re glad there’s so much great work coming to this blog, but we also worry that all that fine work might not be getting the amount—and especially the kind—of publicity it deserves. Social media offers an unprecedented opportunity to get the word out about architecture. It’s…
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Social Media Marketing Tip 109: Getting Great Clients
Follow these three simple steps to attract the perfect client through social media. Though they may sound absurd, they’ve worked for others. 1, Picture a perfect albeit flawed client, and write about him or her or them in a stream of consciousness style. Here’s an example of how this might begin: “My ideal client lives five miles away from my…
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Trade Only Tip 106: Social Media Leadership in 2 Steps
Ideas about leadership are changing fast. From the Lee Iacocca “my way or the highway” model, we are recognizing the immense value of the leader who quietly makes a safe space in which to work and to get a job done right. We are talking about the kind of design professional who can orchestrate colleagues, partners, clients, subs, vendors, craftsmen,…
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You Look Mahvelous! Social Media Tip 106
Dear Friends, This tip concerns our profile photos elicited by Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I hate being photographed. More precisely, my body hates it. My eyes just automatically shut. Photographers need duct tape to keep them open. I am not alone in that department. All the same, everyone needs a good headshot. But why? Isn’t our culture already choking to…
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Ready to End Social Capital Punishment?
Have you ever written a message to someone on Facebook or LinkedIn and heard nothing back? It happens a lot and yet it’s still aggravating, like someone not returning a phone call, refusing to make eye contact, or ignoring an offer to shake hands …
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Latest Workshop Feedback
Interior designers like most visual artists think in color pictures. Louis Postel’s course on social media encourages… Posted by Postel Ink on Saturday, November 21, 2015
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Design Mindsets
Postel on Social Media in Graphis Softus Blog
