At Paris' Maison et Objet show, Lladró featured their new Metropolis collection, skyscrapers decorated with geometric repeats in matte gray tones. These decorative objects are functional vases, boxes and mirrors.

I would definitely enjoy a few in my home!

So happy with my purchase yesterday at Propeller in San Francisco's Hayes Valley. Glass bottle shaped in familiar plastic water bottle silhouette. So simple, but just change in material makes this on my to-buy list. At sale price of $15, I had to get 2!

Here's a guide on how to make your own whisk lamp from Sweet Paul.

Also noticed a cluster of these lamps above the stairway at Anthropologie in San Francisco.

Sweet Paul now has a gorgeous online magazine featuring amazing photography, recipes, craft ideas, and more. Love it!

Made my monthly rounds at Anthropologie today. Okay, so I don't usually buy anything, but I love checking out their store interior and goods from time to time. While they have a large selection of candles, these two caught my eye because they looked nothing like candles.

The top one is displayed with a few stacked on top of each other. I thought it was a small wooden and porcelain drawer set. Only after pulling out the drawer do I realize it contains a candle. The bottom one obviously looks like a spool. I love yarns and such so I picked one up, thinking how strange for such a huge, fancy spool to only come with 1 foot of yarn/ribbon. Very clever indeed!

Top: Fragrance File Candle, Willow Bark, Anthropologie $36

Bottom: Spooled Candle - Large, Anthropologie $34

It's been a while since I've last touched 3D software since I haven't had use for it for soft goods or fashion lifestyle design. But I'm learning Rhino since I know it's a useful tool.

Rendering is always the most difficult part for me. I always have a hard time figuring out lighting. Unfortunately, Rhino's own tutorial and help section is not very helpful. I've referenced a few tutorials online and am super grateful for all the free material resources.

Here's a project I just did as part of an interview for Emoi, which is based in Shenzhen, China. The brief is to design 3-5 products to add to their existing line or create a new product category. I already had a concept in mind from the start, pieces that compliment the home interior and is both decorative and functional. Space-saving is a key requirement. Simplicity is one of Emoi's design philosophy, so my design fits in very well with their company aesthetic. 

For these renderings, I created a large wall to mount the products to and a custom table as backdrop. I am using Brazil 2.0 with Rhino 4.0. Why Brazil 2.0? Because when I look at their gallery, they seem to do great things for jewelry, which I think will come in handy later on. In regards to Brazil rendering settings, this is what I used to create these images (see left). I use Photoshop afterwards to add a few products in to show how these products are used. So before rendering, it's always handy to first have your images so you can tweak your perspective accordingly before it starts rendering. 

I forget how time consuming the rendering process is. I tried setting the size at 2000px by 1500px and it takes about 4.5 hours. 1500px by 750px takes about 2 hours. So while the design itself only took 2 hours, I spent 3.5 days building the model in Rhino and rendering. There doesn't seem to be any way to queue all jobs and let it render everything back to back. I found this script: http://rhinotuts.com/rhinoscript-for-rendering-named-views/
However, it doesn't seem to work correctly. I ran this script in Rhino and picked 2 saved views, let it render overnight, and I ended up with 2 renderings of the same view.

The contrast and shadows aren't the best, but it's not too bad, a nice soft look. For some reason these same settings didn't work out well for couple of other things I tried to render. Still trying to figure out the program.