Blogging Home Decorating and Design: This Emperor Has New Clothes

Anyone who's ever read through home design and decorating blogs has likely noticed an interesting theme come to light after a while; while a few blogs seem mostly dedicated to intelligent and thought provoking articles about innovative and well thought-out designs and decorating, many others seem to be either just a regurgitation of other peoples' ideas, fanboy fawning, or just a blatant mockery.

This isn't to say that all decorating and design ideas are across the board all fabulous or all tragic mistakes, but rarely do you see thoughtful critiques or criticisms of these new ideas or trends.

I suppose for the sake of ease, it's less effort to parrot what other people have already thought out. Unfortunately, reading blog posts that say basically "look what I found on Blah-Blog!" tends to get a little tired. The regurgitation-type of blog post tends to be seen days after you've read the original post where it was first published anyways, making it even less exciting. Unfortunately, many of these repeated posts don't even have the added value of another perspective.

Fanboy/girl posts can come across just like a regurgitated post or actually pull their material from other sources. However, the basic gist of these posts is that whatever design or decorating scheme they're about is just FABULOUS! No questions asked, no criticisms shared, no critical thinking involved. Sometimes these types of blog posts are about some pretty cutting edge kinds of designs and sometimes they're very "vintage", but everything they post about is FABULOUS! For the record, "vintage" seems to be overused as a euphemism for "old, over-priced junk" from what I can gather from a lot of decorating and design blogs.

The third type of blog post that shows up all too often is the catty comment blog. The main purpose of this type of blog is to poke fun at other people's work. While there is no shortage of designs being created by art or design students that make you wonder just what's in the water in whatever city they're studying in, there are also some designs that are very interesting. Unfortunately, snippy one-liners aren't very funny for very long, instead giving a distinctly junior-high kind of feel to the writing.

All is not lost in the world of design and decorating blogs however! As a general bit of advice, look for blogs with authors who actually express their own opinions about ideas, trends, and products. With a little patience and a lot of link-clicking, there are some pretty fabulous blogs out there if you just look around.