design blogs

Looking on line at the web sites of manufacturers and designers is a useful starting point for information about their products - particularly when trying to find out about exact dimensions or the full colour range - but actually blogs can be much more useful for inspiration. Often the comments made and the photographs used can give a practical idea of the products in an everyday context. Over the coming weeks we will post links to sites that we Iook at regularly but there are so many good sites now that it is difficult to keep up so if anyone sends me recommendations then we will post links here.

To start the mouse rolling I would like to recommend two specific sites in this post. The first is by Emma Fexeus who started her blog in 2005 (http://emmas.blogg.se). She is a freelance writer and interior stylist from Stockholm who now (and with justification) describes herself as a professional blogger. She posts an amazing number of articles each month on a wide range of design subjects but mostly on Scandinavia. Many of the photographs she publishes are her own and show furniture and so on in real settings rather than in staged sets. She has just published a book which takes material from her blog as the starting point and I will review that in the next week or so.

The second site is actually more like an online magazine than a blog as it has a team of editors. Remodelista (www.remodelista.com) is a wide-ranging design site rather than being focused specifically on Scandinavian design. They tend to link together a series of well-thought-out posts on themes such as paint and colour and they do profile designers and new products - again in a useful and practical way. They have a good search index but remember to try variations ... so for instance typing in Denmark or Danish brings up different posts.