I am someone who works from home but I don’t exactly have a home office. Instead, I have little office spaces within each of my rooms. I have a desk in my bedroom and a laptop on my bed most of the day. I have a second desk with a PC on it in the living room. And I have an art space in the spare bedroom where I work on more creative projects.

Despite the fact that this scattered approach to home office design is something that works for me, I do think that there are some major benefits to creating your own single home office space. The major benefit of that is that you have one specific place in the house where you work which seems to make it easier to separate work life in home life.

In my opinion, there are three things you need for great home office design. First, you need to make sure that the area that you choose for your home office is well lit, preferably with natural sunlight. Second, you need to make sure that you create storage space and can keep the place free of clutter. And third, you need some furniture or art that makes it personal and comfortable for enjoying your work.

Despite the fact that my home office is littered around different parts of my home, I do have all three of these areas covered. My desks and my art space both get sunlight. I’m unusually good about picking up the clutter in my home so I feel organized while I work. And every room has art and fresh flowers and other creature comforts. So I’ve found a design that works for me. Have you?

Tags: decor, design, home design, home office, houzz, work from home

As a SmartChick I find myself completely interested in impossible car design concepts. For awhile I was totally in love with the Aptera, a three-wheeled car that’s designed by a company in Southern California. I don’t particularly even want a car at all but for half a second I was convinced that this would be the car that I did want if I were to get a car because I just loved how unique and innovative and interesting the design of this green vehicle was.

The car that I’m feeling that way about at the moment is the Terrafugia Transition. Appealing to all of those people who have wondered when we’d have flying cars like the Jetson’s had, this is said to be the world’s first flying car (although in design it’s really more of an airplane that can also do well on the road).

The Terrafugia made some headlines this month when it was finally tested out in the air by a pilot in New York. Launched as a concept in 2006 by MIT business and aerodynamics students, it was finally ready to be flown for real. It only lasted 37 seconds in the air but it was pronounced a success in terms of a milestone for getting the car ready for the road.

The car is basically a plane that can be folded up to look and drive like a car. It reaches highway speeds, gets 30mpg using regular fuel and functions as a small two-seater car would function. The difference is that it can fly distances up to 500 miles away (in theory, anyway) so it can be used for some light travel that isn’t on the road.

It’s an interesting concept. The makers of this car are pegging 2011 as the date when it could be customer-ready so we’ll have to just keep an eye on them until then and see what happens in terms of the developing the design.

Tags: airplane car, auto, car, car plane, concept car, design, flying car, hubpages, innovation, jetsons, kathryn vercill, terrafugia, transition

Every time that my dad mentions that he’s been out riding his bicycle, I ask him if he’s starting wearing a helmet yet. The answer is always no and so we engage in the same brief discussion in which he tells me that bicycle helmets look stupid and I tell him that he’ll look more stupid if his head’s smashed in after a bicycle accident.

To be fair, most bicycle helmets do look stupid. There aren’t that many cool bicycle helmets out there. I don’t actualy ride a bike (which is a whole separate blog post since everyone I know can’t believe that I don’t like bike riding since I love things like walking and hiking and indoor rock climbing). If I did ride a bike, I’d wear a helmet and probably have to take some time to get over the initial feeling that they look kind of goofy.

But there are a few cool designers out there who are trying to do something different with bike helmets to make them more stylish while maintaining the safety of them. One of the designers that’s getting a lot of attention in this area is Yakkay. This company created a line of bike helmets which basically just fit a hat over a standard bike helmet to improve the way that the helmet looks.

I don’t particularly love the designs that are offered by this company for bike helmets and I certainly wouldn’t spend over $100 to get one. However, i like the idea behind this design and I think that it could really go somewhere if other designers pick up on it and try to make it work. And in the meantime, I’ll definiteyl give Yakkay some kudos for coming up with an innovative idea for bike helmet design.

Tags: bicycle helmets, bike helmets, bike safety, design, helmet design, yakkay

One of the things that I do every few months is take a good hard look at my website and all of my blogs to make sure that they look the way that I want them to. It’s hard to remember to do this because you’re usually working on the back end of your website (adding content and optimizing it for search engines). However, the thing that people see when they come to your page is ultimately the only thing that really ends up mattering so I think it’s important to try to get a viewer’s perspective on your sites and blogs every once in awhile.

One of the things that you have to ask yourself when doing this kind of review is whether or not your site looks trustworthy. Most people have ads and links out on their sites and this is normal but the wrong ads or excessive linking can make people feeling like they’re just looking at a lot of spam when they come to your site. The design of the site, the content that you choose to put up, the way that you categorize everything … all of these things have a visual impact on the people who visit your site and you want to make sure that the impact they have is a positive one.

Basically, you have to think about the fact that most people who come to your website aren’t planning to stay there long, especially if they just clicked through from somewhere else on the web. You want to create a website that looks friendly and professional and aesthetically pleasing. You want to make a good first impression. When you meet a new person for the first time, you probably want them to believe that they can trust you right? It’s the same thing with a website.

What are you doing to make your site look like it can be trusted?

For me, the bottom line is that I try to create a site that not only looks trustworthy but actually is trustworthy. I try to stick to writing about topics that I know well enough to provide accurate information about them. I try to make sure that the things I promote through the site are things I would promote in real life if asked. And I keep checking to make sure that the sites look the way that they should so that I can feel comfortable with what I’m putting out there.

Tags: Blog, customers, design, kathryn vercillo, site design, trustworthy, web 2.0, website

I had a really great time yesterday having my picture taken for a cool photo project that’s happening in San Francisco. I’ll be telling you more about that next week but if you’re interested in what it might be then you should check out the website I Live Here: SF which is the platform for the project.

What I want to talk about now is digital cameras. The photographer who came over is a very cool woman who is one of those people that you can tell is just totally herself. And just one simple example of this is that she uses a basic digital camera that isn’t some big fancy schmancy thing.

During the photo shoot, her batteries went dead. When my battery goes dead on my fancy camera, I have to stop taking pictures, take out the battery, recharge it for several hours and then (if I’m lucky) resume what I’m doing. She just popped out her AA batteries, put in new ones and kept on shooting. There’s something to be said for the convenience of that.

Sometimes we don’t need to get the fanciest new gadget out there to create our art work. Sometimes it makes a whole lot more sense to get the item that is right for us regardless of what other people are using or what others think of what we use.

I wrote an article today comparing 7 different 5 MP Cameras. What you can see just from this brief article is that there’s a big difference in the cameras that are out there even when you’re looking at the same megapixel range. There are camera phones, cute cameras, cameras with multiple shooting modes, cameras with cool zoom features … so what matters isn’t that you get the camera with the right megapixels but rather that you get the camera you want.

Tags: 5mp camera, art, cameras, choosing a camera, creativity, design, digital camera, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, photography

A friend was over at my place recently, seeing it for the first time. We were seated in my living room, having a conversation about whatever, when he suddenly realized that there was a fireplace hidden behind my couch. It’s a horrible design choice and one that happened only because of the strange layout of my apartment.

You see, I live in one of those weird San Francisco apartments that used to be a house and then got chopped up into smaller bits. I have great large rooms that are made even larger by French doors that connect the living room the bedroom. I love being able to open up the doors between the two rooms during the day so I can flow through the house.

However, this limits the places I can put a couch in my living room. This is further limited by the strange shape of the room which has a circular section where the Bay windows are. Ultimately, the only thing that made sense was to put a couch in front of the fireplace, blocking it off. The fireplace doesn’t work anyway so it doesn’t really bother me.

Nevertheless, I know this is a design faux pas and eventually I intend to rearrange things in there. I’ve been thinking about all of the ways there are to design around a fireplace to make it cozier and I’ve started to come up with some ideas for that room. It’ll get there eventually.

Tags: cozy home, design, fireplace, houzz, Interior Design

One of the cool things about being a freelance writer is that you get asked how to do all sorts of different things. Because I’ve researched such a diverse range of topics, people will ask me about random stuff in the hopes that I’ve had to learn about it for an article in the past.

For example, someone might ask me how to paint block walls. Even if I’ve never done this outdoor design task before, there’s a good chance that I would know something about it because I’ve done a lot of writing about various building, landscaping and design topics.

Indeed, I do have a basic idea of how to paint block walls. They have to be smoothed out with the right materials, painted with the right type of paint and then sealed over so that the paint doesn’t peel off easily as a result of being out in the elements.

If I wanted to actually do this task myself, I’d do more in-depth research into the specific types of paints and sealants that should be used for the material of the block wall that I was painting (cinder block for example) but even without doing this research, I do have a basic idea of how to do the job. That’s the kind of smart stuff that freelance writers get to learn about all the time!

Tags: design, ehow, freelance work, how to, kathryn vercillo, landscape, painting, writing

I don’t have children of my own but I spent several years working as a foster parent, taking kids into my home. One of the things that I always tried to do was to make sure that the bedrooms that I offered to them were nice. Not fancy nice or filled with nice things – just pleasant places to be, places where they could feel safe and comfortable and maybe even happy.

There were a lot of ways that I did this including trying to personalize their rooms with photos and making sure that the beds were comfortable. But one of the easiest ways that I did this was with paint. I love painting rooms different colors and believe that a kid’s room should be painted to express his or her personality.

For one foster child, we did the room in blue and red because he was a big fan of the University of Arizona Wildcats and that was his favorite color. I also had a smaller bedroom where kids who weren’t going to be with me long stayed. That room was very small but I tried to make it seem bigger and brighter by painting the walls a sunny yellow and doing cloud-like blue-and-white paint on the ceiling.

I think that decorating any kids’ room should be fun. And it should be something that kids get to help with. And it should be something that you do again and again. Check out my recent article on The Best Colors for Decorating a Kids’ Room to get some more inspiration!

Tags: bedroom, children, decor, decorating, design, kids