apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

This is what ATers do for one another in the Cure: look at photos and say, "Move this, add that!" The Photoshopping just isn't as aggressive when we're Curing.

After "rent a designer by the hour," this photo service is a next logical step in commodifying interior design. If you consider Treacy and Wiersema's value disciplines of market leaders, you have three potential approaches to design services:

1. Operational excellence: produce a commodity efficiently. The photo design service limits personalization to a questionnaire of factors, and then a designer can churn out standard solutions. Great way to keep interns busy.

2. Product leadership: produce innovative designs. You make your money off the early adopters and high-end sales; Target and IKEA make their money knocking off your work (unless you get the contract with Target first!).

3. Customer intimacy: provide highly customized design services through a relationship with the client that leads to references and repeat business. Again, you're looking at moderately high-end clients or better, and the work is extremely time-intensive.

People who want design help but are feeling cash-strapped will go with the commodity purchase, especially if they feel that all they need is a quick solution. So love it or hate it, you can justify there being a market for it.

While not opposed to the concept, I'm having a hard time getting past how horribly designed the Design By Photo website is. Silly or not (I personally think not), I wouldn't be inclined to trust the interior design expertise of a company with such a poor user interface and what looks like a bad pre-fabricated website template.

If the site looked (and functioned) better, I'd be more likely to consider their services. I don't think something like this could take the place of an on-site designer, but at the prices quoted on the site, it might be worth seeing what they come up with.

I was going to say that Wende already offers this service, sans photoshop.

Naaaah... I just hang out in threads with people whose opinions are better than mine, making sure I post a lot.

Anna in Newburgh, I agree with you completely. It looks like someone got an HTML for Dummies book and figured "Hey, how hard can it be to create a Web site?" The end result doesn't inspire confidence in their product.

The concept has a lot of promise. I wouldn't use it, but it seems like a good springboard for the average person who can't conceptualize and doesn't have the design vocabulary to articulate what they like (if they even have a decent grasp of their own taste). I love the idea of the hourly service where someone makes changes with your own stuff and the photoshop version of that would definitely sell in cities where the service doesn't exist.

The irksome thing about it is that it seems like it's not a ton of work for them to churn these things out with design software, but a user can't indicate their style (as far as I can tell). You can tell them the problem, but that seems to be about it as far as client input. Seems rather high-handed. Of course, it's really cheap... Totally agree with Anna that the site design is totally unprofessional and off-putting.

This is for the person who fantasizes about having someone from one of those design TV shows come in and help them figure out where to put the sofa so the room works, but who can't afford an expensive interior decorator.

I can see myself using something like this, if I trusted the results enough to make it worth the money. The problem is that I think the limitations of the space and furniture (I have a big desk in a small studio, I rent and can't paint, I don't want to spend a lot of money on new furniture etc) might make it too dificult for them to make some cookie cutter solution work.

What I don't like is that it devalues a creative profession. In this case, TWO creative professions... interior design, and PhotoShop rendering.

I'm not particularly impressed by both the before and after pictures. For this concept to really work well, the "client" would need to be a good photographer and supply multiple photographs, and the "designer" needs to redo each of those photographs with a dramatically better command of photoshop and an enormous library of home furnishings. The after "results" are mediocre at best.

Answering your question, no I would never use a picture based design service.