Color.Imagined?

Benjamin Moore, the color gods, took out a full page ad in July 2004 Metropolis Magazine featuring Hush Lounge in Denver. Very cool.

To read about the design of Hush, go here.

Here is a copy of the ad:

Search Here!

The amazing thing about updating and adding to this blog is the tremendous effort search engines employ to index and cache every word written. At some point, where does all this information finally over-load even the most powerful storage systems and become more useless than useful?

Take, for example, a comment I made about “Lumacite”. LUMAsite® is American Acrylic's designation for shatterproof sheets cast from 100% acrylic or modified polyester resins. American Acrylic does not have their own website - you can only really get to them through other sites like Thomas Register. I don't trust companies that don't have their own sites. I mis-spelled LUMAsite in a previous blog and the funny thing is so does everyone else. I get more hits on my site from people entering Lumacite instead of LUMAsite into Google than anything else.

So let me tell you all about working with LUMAsite. The company is hard to work with. They make it extremely difficult to specify and get their product. For starters, you can’t just call them up and order a single sheet of the stuff. Their sales staff gets all bent out of shape if you try. You have to meet their minimum order for the stuff – usually around 4 sheets of the same product (you can’t mix and match). If you do meet their minimum requirements, you have to send them a check in advance which includes shipping and you have to wait until the check clears before they even get your order in motion (a week and a half right there). If you happen to pick a product that is not in stock, you wait until it is manufactured. We have waited three to four weeks for the stuff to arrive.

Usually we have had good luck with the product arriving without damage but sometimes we have had orders where the top piece is scratched or a corner is bashed from the freighting.

Working with LUMAsite is a drag also. Although the company loves to tout how easily workable the sheet is, I will tell you that cutting the stuff is a nightmare. Using a table saw with a blade set up for cutting plastic is the best option but even that requires a full face shield, gloves (which I hate using when working on a table saw), and long sleeves. As you cut the stuff, the kerf splinters into tiny shards of shrapnel that are moving fast enough to pierce your skin and cause a serious itchy rash to develop as the resin reacts with your skin. It sucks! The dust from the process is gross too.

As a design or architectural product, the use of LUMAsite is tired and boring. Every architect and interior designer either has, or tries to be so innovative in backlighting panels of LUMAsite as if they are the first creative soul to ever think of it! The ultimate worst design faux pas is to combine Kolor Kinetics with LUMAsite for the most boring, over-spec’ed lighting effect to be propagated through the architectural and design industry in the last 5 years. As I have said in previous entries, every new nightclub, lounge, bar, and restaurant that thinks of themselves as design trendsetters has either considered this lame one-liner or has bought into some architect or designer’s BS and employed its cheesy result. If you have ever tried sitting next to a wall of Kolor Kinetics cycling through its “millions of colors” at a pace that is slightly faster than your heart rate, you will know what I am talking about. It literally makes you sick.

So hopefully, when you newbie wannabee designers and architects finally hear the name of this “new” product called either LUMAsite or lumacite, and you enter it into your search engine as
“I want to be the first designer to buy and use lumasite for my innovative project – where do I go to find it?”, you will land here and read my warning. Do not be such a follower of trends that have already gone. Innovate on your own and leave the LUMAsite alone.

Oh yea, one other heads-up for those of you who insist on copying trends anyways and have convinced yourself that your application is different because you are using LUMAsite so differently than those who have come before you: LUMAsite is not building code compliant - it is flamable and burns causing toxic fumes. As it burns, it melts and drips burning blobs of molten resin. So, before you run out an specify a room of backlit panels for the hottest new nightclub you think you are designing, you better check your building codes first. Most building inspectors are very dubious of using plastics of any kind where there is danger of combustion and usually they are very unforgiving if you try and push their use outide of the strict code requirements.