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Simple Gift #2: Fuel Up

The second post of the Simple Gift of Light series is the first step of relighting your life: fuel up. The first step towards improving your life with the simple gift of light is to start seeing light like our ancestors did: as a mystical, magical, and even sacred gift. This is going to take […]

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Seven Saintly Solutions

The Light Can Help You Logo, which is a light bulb with a smile, with a halo. Title of the presentation: Seven Saintly Solutions of Lighting Layout - A Presentation by Light Can Help You with DMF Lighting

One of the perks of starting your own company is that you get to pick your job title. At some point I decided that “Chief Evangelist of Light” (CEL) would be my own. Evangelist is a term that can have positive and negative connotations in our society, and that makes CEL of risky title. I […]

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Humble Know-it-alls

An illustration of a pedestal with a microphone on top of it on the left and in the center is a human sized drawing dummy with the Light Can Help You light bulb logo on it's chest

“They are total know-it-alls.” I often ask homeowners, integrators, architects, and others if they have ever worked with a lighting designer. Most homeowners have not, and many do not know that we exist. The story is different for those in the trade. And in residential lighting design, from the responses I receive, there are know-it-alls […]

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Time Zooms By

Three people's video feeds in a Zoom meeting on a computer screen

Whew. It’s been hard to find time to blog the past few months. I can blame that on the pandemic, but that is only partially true. I’ll blame it on Zoom instead. Our design team is spread across three time zones and six states, and we rely on remote communication tools like Zoom for continual […]

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The Future of Shades?

A close up on strange, futuristic window shades on a window

Simply put, we need natural light to be happy and healthy.  We need lots of it in the mornings to wake up, plenty mid-day to keep us going, and a soft tapering at night to relax us towards sleep. The best source of natural light is…well…nature.  But sunshine comes with a few drawbacks, such as […]

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Bedrooms: Beyond Sleeping

An illustration of a bedroom with lighting dos on the left and lighting donts on the right.

We have a certain number of formulas for illuminating a bedroom. We layer in lighting to deliver our five promises of light in these rooms just as we would anywhere else in the home. The solutions are different in a bedroom than in a kitchen because the function and form of each space is vastly […]

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Time Marches On

The cover of TIME magazine with Martin Luther King, Jr. on the cover with the words "His Legacy: The Fight for Equality"

A career in lighting design can lead to some unusual experiences like living on a cruise ship in dry dock or spending the night in a shopping mall in Las Vegas. Every once in awhile, the experience opens your eyes. Just before the pandemic shut down our society, TIME opened THE MARCH at Chicago’s Dusable […]

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We All Age In Place

A winter view from the shore of one of the lakes near Madison, WI.

I made plans to write on this topic months before the world changed underneath us. Back then, Living in Place was an emerging term that encapsulated a myriad of design ideas intended to help us live better lives without having to change locations. Comfort, accessibility, safety, and wellness all fit within the term. Age in […]

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A Better Life with Light

The cover of Technology Design magazine with an extravagant back deck of a large modern house complete with pool. Lit up at dusk.

Technology Designer magazine has the best coverstock of any magazine that has ever published my writing…and the attention to detail doesn’t stop there. The graphic design is clean and modern and the whole magazine is as luxurious as the projects inside. Okay, enough of a plug for the magazine!  If you want to decide if […]

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Vegas: City of Light (seeing) 2

An expensive hotel room with a large living area separated from the sleeping area by a wrought iron railing. There are many lamps all turned on lighting up the room.

Awhile back I posted a Lightseeing piece when I attended a conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Sometimes conferences take places at hotels that have pretty scruffy rooms. This was not one of those conferences. Every room at the Venetian is a suite; the one above was mine. I counted over twenty light sources […]

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The Future of Control?

A black Multiverse Transmitter box with four antennae coming from the back end - 900 MHz/2.4GHz

Earlier in my career I saw theater and architecture as two separate worlds. In one world I got to use cool control systems, color-changing lights, and mood-setting scenes. In the other world I got to use brilliant spotlights and broad wash lights. At some point I realized I was borrowing tools and techniques from theater […]

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