Made by Sean Ohlenkamp and Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp, this is the coolest movie ever about something as mundane as organizing a bookcase. Not only does the viewer learn several different strategies for filling shelves in attractive ways, but the whole thing is playfully done in painstaking stop-motion. Organization can be fun after all!
If the contents of your bookcase are randomly strewn about, here are some ways to extract the beauty that organized books can lend to a room:
1. Rainbow color order
2. Bottom-up stacks (maybe a tad bit neater than these)
3. No spines showing (not the most practical, but forms a lovely sea of creams)
4. A few horizontal stacks here and there (you can even spell out a message with the spines)
Via: YouTube
Animation: Sean Ohlenkamp and Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp
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This made me smile. Love the music too:-)
Great video.
I wish rainbow made sense, It is the most eye pleasing, but how do you find your books? I need my New York travel guide, but I'll settle for a yellow.
I guess I could do the "sea of cremes" with the spines in then use different color sharpies to write the titles on the paper edges. Different colors for types of books, Novels, Travel, Info, etc.
Love this!! Our books are in rainbow order and it works for me because I've got one of those freaky photographic memories :)
Put a banana on it.
Cute video, but I don't get the impression that the intent was to teach useful organizational methods.
I am occasionally tempted to cover each and every one of my books with brown kraft paper dust jackets and hand letter or use a typewriter to label the spines. It would be a big project at the onset, but thereafter a cinch to create a new jacket for each book as it comes into the house. Still, I like the color the books lend to the living room, where they are (loosely) organized by genre and that it all.
I love apartment therapy, but --
"rainbow order" is for people who don't care about reading! It's anti-book. It's anti-culture. I really hate it!
"spine-in" is even worse. Just not helpful.
Check out our post today on organizing bookcases. http://ourmothersdaughters.blogspot.com/2011/02/homemade-bookshelves-and-organized.html
Rainbow order wouldn't work for me, but calling it anti-book and anti-culture is going to far. I recognize that some people, especially people who are interested in design sites, are visual people who may easily remember the color of a book, which may help them locate it on the bookshelf much more easily than having to, for example, peruse author names.I suspect that it isn't really all that different from knowing where to look for my large format books.
Still, I don't believe that storing books on their spines is good for the books.
great video! cheered me up! once I tried to move around my cyclopedia and I hurt my back
So thumbs up for the hard work behind this video!
That was adorable!
I'm a writer, a book hoarder and a "rainbow order-er" and definitely NOT anti-book! I love my 500+ books, but when they're ordered by topic or author, the visual noise makes me batty.
haha im glad i pushed play, was not expecting that!
I dont have many books, because i only buy books i really love so usually I know exactly what they look like, so even if they were in rainbow order i could find them pretty easily.
my favorite part was the dragon dancing around!
but then again, what few I have remaining are color ordered now a kindle reader!
If they had organized the books by size, they probably could have fit an extra shelf in each bookcase, increasing the amount of storage space.
Congrats on making such a creative stop animation! Fun, and frivolous, yes. Imaginative and inspiring, oh yes. As for the book loving debate, playing with books is simply a visual thing, not a moral lapse, I say. Where do I land? I shelve my pared down collection of 400+ books somewhat by topic, some shelves vertical, some horizontal, some stacked flush left, others flush right, with the occasional combo of all of the above. It looks lovely, feels cozy; and it's always fun to peruse the titles for fond memories of bright ideas cached in their thousand of pages.
Cute AND clever animation.
I enjoyed it. The designer in me loved the color coordination idea back when it started surfacing in all the design mags several years back, but it's starting to feel a little cliche. That being said, I still think it is beautiful.
Are my shelves organized by color? As much as I'm tempted to turn my standard IKEA shelving unit into a piece of art, no. They are sorted by topic. The librarian in me would go crazy any other way.
That being said, I'm going to share this video with friends. I'm a sucker for stop animation. :)
must have taken SO MUCH WORK to get this vid done. that said - i liked watching it! *smile
If only I could arrange books that fast! I use a lot of my reference books in work so I have to keep mine in order of subject. That said, it still took me ages to put back two bags' worth during half-term so. Fortunately, arranging books by colour is not something that appeals to me but, actually, now as I look at the shelves, I can see that I do have some weird thing about arranging them according to size.....
Anyway, Auntie Leila, I tried scrolling through your bookshelf post and, nice bookcase but, there seems to be some confusion between a DIY project and a baby! They can't both be DIY projects, unless one of them involved mis-using a turkey baster , surely? :)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SPAM ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How long did it take you to do the entire film? I did a similar film on a kitchen table filling up with foof and it took forever!
"foof"?
that is just too cute!!! makes me miss all the books i just donated!!!!