How Ideabooks Have Improved Design Collaboration
Designing the architecture and interior of your home can be difficult. With so many options for everything from flooring to accent pieces, it can be hard to put together a solid and unified design portfolio. Traditionally, people shared inspiration with their designers by searching through dozens of magazines and physically cutting out images that resonated with them. This method was labor intensive, time consuming and ended up leaving many questions unanswered with the potential of losing ideas in translation. At Nor-Son Custom Builders, we have streamlined the collaboration process by utilizing the popular online resource Houzz.com. At the onset of every project, we encourage our clients to create a profile, if they don’t already have one, and compile ideas using the Ideabook feature. This feature acts like a hyper-organized Pinterest board that you can easily share with your designers. Simply post pictures in your Ideabook and let your design team handle the rest!
Getting Started
Creating your Ideabook is simple. Start by setting up your profile which should take no longer than a few minutes and will give you instant access to the thousands of images, stories and inspiration boards created by the design professionals that make up the Houzz.com community. Once you’re logged in, you can easily search for specific design styles, products, and even colors that you like. When you find a photo that interests you, simply click the Save button at the bottom of the photo and a new screen will pop up prompting you to add the photo to your Ideabook. You can create a new Ideabook for every inspiration element you find. In fact, we encourage our clients to use descriptive titles to organize their images by room, finish or design elements, and to add notes to each image illustrating what it is you like most about the photo. This helps our project teams understand the specifics of your inspiration so it can be tailored to your unique design.
Ideabooks aren’t limited to interior and exterior basics; you can create folders for each and every piece for your future construction. If you have always dreamed of having a hexagonal coffee table accent piece, you can make a folder for that. Want to bring interest to your interior with shiplap, brick walls or dark wood colors, you can create an Ideabook for that too. With Ideabooks, there is no limit to how creative and involved you can be in your project.
Sharing the Vision
One of the best features of Houzz.com, is the ability to share your Ideabooks and inspiration not only with your design team, but with the team who will building your project. Simply click the Invite button below your Ideabook title and add collaborators by typing in their Houzz user name or email address into the search field. Once you’ve added collaborators to your Ideabook, they will receive a notification email to view your images and provide feedback. But that’s not all, each time you add a new photo to your Ideabook or make changes to your comments, each collaborator will receive a notification email inviting them to view the changes making the collaboration process more fluid, instantaneous, and interactive than traditional methods.
Ideabooks make it extremely easy to organize your thoughts for every aspect of your home or building project. With help from these online resources, let the expert teams at Nor-Son Custom Builders be your partner in designing the building of your dreams! Check out Nor-Son on Houzz.com today!
