Creative Design

Creating lighting around your house is an expression of your personality and how you want to give enjoyment to locals. There are many ways to install lights from throwing lights up randomly to creating a theme or story enacted through light displays/ sequences. This blog focuses on theme creation because it's more enjoyable to you, the creator/ designer and your audience.

So we'll examine the important points so you can stimulate your creativity:

1 theme - using a theme gives continuity to lights and draws the audience in to watch the sequence and theme development. This is especially true for children who pick this up quickly. A theme makes your light display stand out and be memorable; it also allows you to reuse elements in different combinations so as to be new to the eye.

2 sequence - using sequences can move people through your lighting display and achieve continuous attention, ie not boring. Sequencing also reduces competition between light displays (see below) and gives sharper colours. Using sequences also reduces your electricity bill!

3 black space (similar to white space in a document) - colours are sharper with a black background (ie night) than other colours. Also having many light bulbs/ LEDs on together causes colour leaching due to how the human eye perceives colour combinations and relative brightness. Compare these 2 photos:

4 natural features - usually there are many natural features like large trees, rocks, ground slopes, house gables/ roof line, columns, etc which can be great resources to use in lighting features.

5 human perception - we will exploit humans' capacities to perceive light, movement, colour combinations, etc. This will enable us to simplify our light displays, eg a waterfall only needs 4 sequences of light movement.

6 lighting technology and its structure (ie architecture) - this is critical aspect and will ultimately determine your success. I will show you how to use (Chinese made cheap) products as building blocks to make the displays (you can't afford to buy the parts nor the time to build light strings). The choice is either buy a sophisticated lighting controller ($1000+) or DIY .... for those who want to build the controllers, I can give electronic circuits or software code to use Arduino (TM)microcontrollers to execute your lights. This  will be great fun!

7 safety - obviously this is very important for spectators, family, neighbours and pets.

 

So click on the important point above for more info or select lighting controllers, light displays for great projects to build. The concept is to make construction very simple and need little technical knowledge.... similar to LEGO (TM) which make the blocks/ figures/ etc and you make the creations!

Please send in emails with your photos or suggestions for displays. Also I can provide limited design advice on how to design a light display or controller.