Blog Wild

Independent Design Sites Blend Advice, Opinion and One-Click Access

Washington designer Ky Ta submitted photos of his apartment to a contest on Apartment Therapy, a design blog, and made it to the contest's final round. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

For people obsessed with design, the advent of design-focused Web journals, or blogs, has been a wonderful, terrible development.

Wonderful because these idiosyncratic Web sites, in which specific and frequently updated content is filtered through an individual blogger's sensibility, give devotees an opportunity to indulge their obsession at the click of a computer mouse. Terrible because, as anyone who has ever discovered a favorite blog already knows, the impulse to hit the "refresh" button every five minutes to see what has been posted most recently can take over one's life, putting things like social calendars and professional advancement in peril.

In the past few years, blogs such as Apartment Therapy ( http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ ), MoCo Loco ( http://www.mocoloco.com/ ), Design*Sponge ( http://www.designsponge.blogspot.com/ ) and Funfurde ( http://www.funfurde.blogspot.com/ ) have emerged to constitute a bona fide design district within the blogosphere, the collective noun denoting all the blogs to be found on the Internet. (Estimates of how many blogs exist vary absurdly, with some analysts guessing around 3 million, others closer to 30 million -- a discrepancy rooted in these analysts' inability to agree on the definition of "blog.")

Think of the typical design blog as equal parts bulletin board, cocktail party, garage sale and aesthetic manifesto. On any one of them, a visitor might find a sequence of posts celebrating a new line of furnishings from a major retailer, soliciting opinions on a coveted coffee table, advertising a sofa for sale and decrying a new building that has been much ballyhooed by the architectural press. Upon discovering a design blog, you'll likely be directed to others that are similar to it via internal links; once that has happened, you're helplessly, happily stuck in the Matrix, and there's no getting out.

"They're a great interactive resource," says interior designer Ky Ta of the District. By posting questions on blog comment boards, he says, "you can basically leverage the entire design community to solve problems. They're also a great buying guide for people who don't necessarily know where to go to look for certain things. So they're really providing a free service, and anyone with an Internet connection can use it."

Ta regularly scans several design blogs, he says. In October, he e-mailed pictures of his U Street apartment to one of his favorites, Apartment Therapy, and quickly became a finalist in a contest sponsored by the site to find "the boldest, coolest, most colorful room in the USA." Though in the end he had to settle for runner-up status, Ta says that the "great feedback" he received from other readers proved to be a grand prize indeed.

One unique aspect of blogs is the way in which their creators and consumers are always switching places. Most blogs, including most design blogs, are solo operations administered by an amateur blogger who adds new posts whenever he or she can find the time. Larger blogs such as Apartment Therapy have teams of editors with different bailiwicks, and actually make money -- or at least try to -- by selling space to advertisers. (Apartment Therapy, which launched in March 2004, boasts 14,000 visitors daily.)

At sites large and small, readers are encouraged to submit content in the form of comments to existing posts, or quite often in the form of full-length posts of their own. In this way, design blogs -- unlike the shows on HGTV or the glossy shelter and design magazines -- are truly democratic media, to which everybody is free to offer a critique, share a clever idea or shed light on an unsung talent or little-known product.

Jill Slater, an editor at New York-based Apartment Therapy, got her job by impressing the blog's creator and chief editor, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, with the quality and erudition of her frequent posts. She notes that the relationship between the blog's editors and its readers is far more intimate than that of a magazine or TV show and its fans.

Another frequent poster, she says, "was so important that [Gillingham-Ryan] wrote him when we were trying to plan our holiday party date, just to make sure he could come; we actually waited to book the space until we knew he was free that night." She also notes that on the blog's "open thread" posts -- free-for-all message boards where visitors can discuss any topic they want, design-related or not -- "there's a real sense of community. People are like, 'Can you help me pick out a couch?' and suddenly there are all these links from everybody. But they're also sharing Thanksgiving recipes, and asking about each other's kids."

Recently, Apartment Therapy added a feature that allows people to submit photos of whatever catches their eye -- "a cool couch, a great design on a tile floor, anything really," says Slater -- by taking a picture with a cell phone and e-mailing it to the site, where they appear in series of four with brief comments by the photographers. The pictures appear instantly, and are bumped only when new ones arrive to take their place.

This immediacy, says MoCo Loco blogger Harry Wakefield, truly sets blogs apart from traditional media. Readers unable to attend a furniture fair in Milan or an exhibit opening in San Francisco can nevertheless be among the first to know what's creating a stir, thanks to bloggers like him.

"MoCo Loco covered ICFF [the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, held annually in New York] in real time. I posted the images the same day I took them. And we did Tokyo Design Week within a day of the end of that event. We can present design news faster" than magazines or newspapers, he says.

Of course, the editorial process at magazines and newspapers is inevitably slowed not only by printing and distribution, which take a significant amount of time, but also by the intervention of legions of editors, diligently checking content for accuracy, balance and tone. Most blogs have no comparable infrastructure. News and opinion often bleed into one another -- but no one seems to mind. In fact, it's one of the things readers love about them.

"I get to say practical things the magazines can't," says the blogger behind Funfurde, who prefers not to give his real name. ("My day job technically precludes me from blogging," he confesses.) "Like, 'Yes, it's a brilliant piece by a renowned designer, but really it's just a block of painted foam, so should it cost $5,000?' Or, 'Is a chair made of concrete really going to be comfortable?' On Funfurde you can appreciate the brilliance of design but also ask the question: Does it actually work? Not all design has to be useful, of course, but most of the magazines don't even try to address that.

"I can also start out with incomplete information," he adds. " 'Hey, here's a really cool sofa, but I don't know how much it costs or where you can buy it.' Usually within 24 hours a Funfurde reader has chimed in with the information. And that's totally acceptable. No one complains; in fact, they're happy to help. Try that in a magazine!"