Autodesk Homestyler is a cool free online tool that lets you experiment with interior design on the browser. Using a home designing solution like Autodesk Homestyler also lets you visually decide on things like furniture placement and color combinations. You might finally plonk down money for some professional advice, but experimenting on Autodesk Homestyler helps you give some personal inputs to the designer along with the money.

So, let’s play around with the very promising online designing tool and see if it can bring our interior design plans to life. All you need is a browser. Autodesk Homestyler also has a Chrome app.

After you register and log-in, press the large green button to start designing. Autodesk Homestyler takes you through five stages to your perfect home.

You can start from scratch or pick a design from the gallery. I am going to build it fresh from the ground up. What you get is this very sleek canvas for the house of your dreams:

Designing the basic structure is a simple case of drag & drop. You can easily change the dimensions to match your structural drawings. The little pop-up on the side lets you Split or Demolish the walls to change the shape of the rooms or create passage ways. Those little pop-ups are context sensitive and will give you selective options depending on the item you are using in your design.

You can work with the gamut of these structural items when it comes to completing your designs. Clicking on the little Home icon on the catalog side-panel reveals the entire list.

Here’s a snapshot of the choices for doors. There are categories like – entry doors, closet doors, interior doors, garage doors, and patio doors to sift through for the perfect requirement. Homestyler takes great pains to cover all generic items you might need to design your house.

Below the generic items you will notice a catalog of related products (Brands & Collections) advertised by retailers. Homestyler brings a rich menu of well-known brands for your entire design needs. What’s really cool is that you can drag and drop their products on to your design. The products are proportionate to the actual measurements, so you get an idea of the area an item takes up. In fact, you can also start a shopping list with the branded items you are planning to put into your house.

You can design a multi-level house one floor at a time. From the 2D floor plan, with a click on the 3D button, you get an idea of how exactly everything is coming together. You cannot add items in the 3D view but you can drag paint walls and move anything (doors, windows etc.) that are attached to the walls. Autodesk Homestyler gives you 200+ choices to play around with the wall color of your choice. I just brushed (actually dragged & dropped) the wall of my ‘house’ with Reddish Earthtone. The pan-zoom- rotate controls help you view the model from all angles.

Oh, did I forget to mention that you can add trees, potted plants, as well as landscaping items to create your dream outdoors.

One of the really cool features of Autodesk Homestyler is it allows you to take snapshots with a very handy ‘online camera’.

Once you click your snap, it is sent for processing and you get an alert when it comes back from the ‘lab’. Here is mine:

That’s it! My first level house is ready. Frank Lloyd Wright would probably rollover in his grave, but this was my first attempt and a very casual one for the purpose of this article. A more professional job will look like this:

Waxing Praise

If you are hankering for a free online tool to create mockups of your dream house, I think you will love this this program. It’s sleek, fast, and pretty much full-featured. In fact, if I can hazard a guess, it can hold its own against the best online home designing solutions out there. Plus, it’s all free. I haven’t mentioned a few more features like the export and sharing options which are pretty much standard stuff. The one thing you should check out is the lineup of video tutorials that take you through the tool.

Are you a wannabe home designer? Looking for ways to design your own home? Potter around with Autodesk Homestyler and give us a feedback. You can also check out some previous posts for design inspirations:

Create a House Floor Plan with FloorPlanner
3 Floor Design Services to Decorate and Plan your House
The 6 Best Blogs For Architectural & Interior Design Ideas

Do you know a little about engineering? Electronics? Programming? Bad sci-fi horror movies? Mix all of that up and you have a recipe for awesome geek decorations. Here’s a selection of Halloween house decorations which have been designed by geeks with a little too much spare time on their hands. Go science!

Light Displays

Use your knowledge of wire and switches to build complicated lighting arrangements. Control them manually, program your light sequence or work some sensors in to add a little excitement.

Sound Displays

Put on a little quiet creepy music to set the scene, then add sound effects to disturb and terrify your guests. Try your favourite horror movies for sound effect ideas. For music, there’s plenty of creepy organ music on YouTube. Why not make a playlist?

Remote Control

If you have a view of your yard, you can watch where people are and use a remote control to scare them at just the right time. Hours of fun!

Sensor Control

Over and above the basic electrical skills comes working with sensors. Light sensors, audio sensors and touch sensors can all be used to make your Halloween decorations just a little bit more spooky.

Programmed Sequences

Use some basic programming skill to control the overall sequence of events. Make some things constant, others every two minutes, while the occasional event only happens directly after something else (but only every fifth time). If this is done as well as the remote-controlled and sensor-controlled events it will be even better!

Automatic Movement

Hydraulics, magnets and propulsion are all easy ways to get things to move by themselves. Try making something that jumps up, squirts water, squirms or shoots across the yard.

Add Character

Look to bad horror flicks, B-grade sci-fi and creepy books to come up with characters and scenes which will scare the pants off your audience. Want something creepy spoken? Record some Poe.

Chemistry

Don’t forget your dry ice and liquid light!

Scary Paths

Make a maze or a drawbridge so that your guests have to walk by your scariest items. You know you’ve done really well when only a few kids are brave enough to make it to your door.

Geek Characters

If scary stuff isn’t your thing, you can just avoid the cliché Halloween decorations and turn your house into a geek’s paradise. The kids will suddenly find Optimus Prime a whole lot scarier.

Geek Pumpkins

If you just want to add a geek twist to a traditional Halloween decoration, have a go at some geeky carved pumpkins like cylons. The possibilities are endless.

Mix it up

For extra geek points, mix it all up. If you add one new item per year you’ll get there eventually. Make a partially sensor-controlled and part remote-controlled audio-visual display with spooky lighting, creepy music and sounds, things that move by themselves using hydraulics and magnets, mazes and the works. Feature scenes and characters from the most creepy books or movies you have ever found. Voila! The neighbourhood kids will be torn between the need to take a look and the need to be elsewhere very quickly.

You might also like these DIY projects for Halloween including recipes and costumes. Hope you enjoy creating something special this Halloween using these ideas for inspiration. Let us know what you come up with!

Are you just fascinated by beautiful photos of great architecture? Do you love ingenious furniture design? Are you fascinated by people who make small spaces habitable? Thinking of renovating?

Whatever draws you to the world of architecture and interior design, there are plenty of great blogs out there ready to provide you with your daily dose. Here is a list of five of the best blogs around to show you beautiful interior design ideas and architectural designs.

1. Dezeen

Dezeen “” short for Design Magazine “” has an architectural focus, covering new trends in architecture. However, it also often features furniture, lighting and transport. There’s a clear environmentally-friendly slant, with a whole section dedicated to green design. The pictures on this blog are bright and beautiful, leaving readers drawn to the fascinating structures it shows.

2. Desire To Inspire

If you’re after just interior design ideas, Desire to Inspire is a fabulous place to start. This blog is run by two girls who have never met, each with an eye for the perfect room. Whether it be rustic, modern, formal or casual, these girls will find it and feature it. The beautiful photography and interior design featured in this blog will fill you with the urge to redecorate.

3. Decor8

Decor8 is very focused on interior design ideas, featuring plenty of neat household decorations and entire rooms decorated to a theme. There are also plenty of photographs of simple stylistic things you could do to brighten up a section of your house. Decor8 also create great collages of photos when there are too many to choose from!

4. Apartment Therapy

Apartment Therapy is about how to design the interior of your entire house, how to live in small spaces and great ways to brighten up your house. The beautiful photography features complete rooms, sets of pillows, DIY furniture and crafty ideas you can imitate easily. When they find a house worth displaying in its entirety, they write a full feature article on the home and offer a gallery tour, showing many more photos of the house.

5. Freshome

Freshome “” a combination of the words Fresh + Home “” is a blog focused entirely on architectural and interior design ideas. The blog’s beautiful pictures will captivate your imagination and fire up your home planning ideas. There are also plenty of great how-to guides to help you make the most of your space.

Architecture Blog Tumblr

The Architecture Blog Tumblr is quite addictive for architecture-lovers. There’s no formal articles written, and they merely re-publish photos of great architecture, but that’s what makes it great. As always on Tumblr, readers can click through to the original articles and see more. So this makes it a great way to quickly browse some great photos and dig deeper if you’re really interested.

Plus, this Tumblr is curated by someone with great taste in both architecture and photography. It’s bound to give you some great architectural ideas! There’s no need to be a Tumblr user “” just follow the RSS feed or browse away.

Tell us your favourite blogs

If your favourite architecture or interior design blog isn’t listed, then please let us know in the comments. There can never be enough!

We’ve talked about printing posters in the past, even reviewed multiple applications, like PosteRazor or Rasterbator, that can help you cut bigger posters up, and piece them together with regular-sized paper.

Somehow we skipped the first installment; where to find suitable posters for printing? Google’s a good guess, but read on for MakeUseOf’s top 4 sites to find free printable posters.

Movie Poster Archive

Practically everyone has had a movie poster brandish his wall at some point in his life. I have trouble believing anyone who denies the fact. Apart from being often beautifully designed, movie posters carry a vibe and history that’s unknown to most other formats.

Movie Poster Archive is, without doubt, the number one source for free printable movie posters. They offer an impressive selection of current and vintage movie posters. Admittedly, at 586 pixels width, these posters won’t soon pass a close-up inspection, but works perfectly fine for personal use.

TypographicPosters

The second type of poster – closing in fast behind movie posters – are typographical. Typography is the art of arranging typefaces in an eye-pleasing manner. This site pulls in these typographic posters from 408 different directories, at the time of writing. Depending on the artist, this might be from a Portuguese anti-smoking campaign, or a Canadian festival line-up.

No matter the concept, every single one proves to be an interesting work of art. You can browse the site in large or small raster views, or by category. If you know what you’re looking for, you can also use the built-in search pane. At about 910 pixels width, these posters are also of better printing quality.

Poster-Street

Poster-Street is a very interesting site that offers free printable posters for every occasion; be it for work, school, or your home. The posters you find on Poster-Street are aimed at witty one-liners and entertaining compositions, but aren’t of the same visual quality as said posters above. Nevertheless, it offers a good source for decorating posters and conversation-starters.

The resolution of these posters also far precedes most other online poster alternatives. In fact, most of the posters are vectored PDFs, and can be printed as large as you want, in crisp quality.

TechPosters

This last site couldn’t be left out from a nerdy poster line-up. On TechPosters.NET, you’ll find a variety of nerdy posters to sire your wall. These range from simple sheet-cheats, to infographs, and witty internet ads. If you’re a fervent internet user or tech enthusiast, you’ll be delighted by the posters offered on this site.

The resolution is highly dependent on the poster in question, because they’re pulled in from all over the web. In general, it’ll usually be between 500 and 1000 pixels wide, much like the other infographs you’ll see online.

Do you have any other tips for finding free printable posters? Let us know in the comments section below!

PaintingWalls is a simple iPhone app that will help you to decide there and then. It simulates different paint colours on your walls and lets you make an informed decision. It usually retails for $0.99 but we have 25 codes to give away.

This giveaway runs for a little under 48 hours and will end tomorrow, 21 March 2010 at 2100hrs PST. Grab them quick!

In order to use PaintingWalls, you’ll need an image to work with. Either load it from your camera roll or take a new image. This iPhone application was designed to help simulate different colours on clear, empty walls but it works just fine if the room is furnished, as you can see from the middle image below. I was in Ikea yesterday and took a snapshot of a dimly lit Swedish living room. Tap the colour palette to select any colour (although its best to select a colour that contrasts the original colour of the wall you’re trying to paint), you can change the colour later.

After selecting a colour, tap on an area in the image you wish to fill with paint. The app will try to “fill” the surrounding similar coloured areas. Then here’s the fun part. Tap and hold the screen then move your finger in either a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction to expand/contract the painted area. Don’t try to expand until the entire wall is filled with paint — it doesn’t work that way. What you should do is tap on an unfilled area and expand the paint separately. Pretty soon, you’ll have the entire wall painted (even with furniture acting as obstacles). Now, you may use the colour palette to select a new colour and it will automagically replace the paint’s colour in your image.

Go ahead and experiment! Change the colour until you find something you like. If the image of your room is poorly lit (like mine was), PaintingWalls has this really cool feature which lets you optimise the paint according to the lighting in the room. When you’re done, it will allow you to save the image, send it to someone via email or share it on Facebook and/or Twitter.

PaintingWalls is a pretty easy tool to use and it really helps cut down on unexpected events when adding colour to your new home. We have 25 codes to share with MakeUseOf readers within the next 48 hours!

How do I become a winner?

It’s simple. Just follow the steps.

STEP 2
	Share this post with your friends by clicking on the Share button on the left.

STEP 3
	In the comments section below, fill in your name, email address, paste the link to your Facebook profile in the URL field and tell us why you’d like to win. Make sure to enter your real email address so that we can contact you if you win!

This giveaway will end on Sunday, 21 March 2010 at 2100hrs PST. Be sure that you grab them quick — first come, first served! Codes will be sent to winners via email after the giveaway is over. Have fun!

MakeUseOf would like to thank Xavier from Enginy Studios for his generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

Why is a poster so appealing? Maybe it’s because a poster is more than a photo.  It is something that captures life in greater width and height. That’s why posters also easily become keepsakes.

Growing up, I had to buy my posters and the larger the size, the higher went the costs. I also managed to create a few self made ones, but they were more of collages, a glued up motley of my favorite images.

We didn’t have the tools for the job that could help us make our own posters. But thanks to software, now stitching together a poster is only about getting the image right. The ink and paper costs are there but the software does the poster personalization.

PosteRazor is a free software that easily helps you make your own posters at home. All that you need is an idea, the PosteRazor freeware and a standard color printer. PosteRazor is open source and a really small download at 484KB.

Poster lovers can check out a very early MakeUseOf HowTo: Free & Huge Custom Poster For Your Wall article that shows how to print out sections of a large image on standard size paper, and assemble it all as a huge poster.

PosteRazor also takes a Raster image as an input file and cuts it into pieces that can be printed out using a standard sized printer. The cut pieces can then be assembled into a complete poster by gluing the edges together.

What’s simple about PosteRazor is the wizard that has just five steps from the starting image to the finished poster.

1. Browse to your image and load it into PosteRazor. The original dimensions of the image file are indicated in this window.



2. Defining the paper size that your printer can handle is the critical part. The decision to fit the paper to the image or the image to the paper has to be made here. A few standard paper sizes are available from the dropdown. Alternatively, you can opt to go for a custom size.



3. Overlapping margin areas are needed for gluing the pieces together. Overlapping positions are for side by side borders of the divisions that will tile together in the final poster.



4. Defining the final poster size is choosing between a fixed size, panning it out over multiple sheets, or increasing the original size by a percentage.



5. In the final step, the poster is saved as a multi-page PDF file.



A PDF file is a universal document format and can be opened by a reader in all OS. Image color types also can be maintained across computers.

All that’s left now is the labor of printing the sheets out and assembling them together with glue on the overlapping margins.

As a simple tool to make your own scaled posters, PosteRazor has a few plusses going for it like its easy portability, very simple interface, and compatibility with Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It also covers a large number of image formats like – BMP, DDS, Dr. Halo, GIF, ICO, IFF, JBIG, JPEG/JIF, KOALA, LBM, Kodak PhotoCD, PCX, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, Photoshop PSD, Sun RAS, TARGA, TIFF, WBMP, XBM, and XPM.

Creating posters is something you may not do every day. But if you find an image that you would love to turn into a poster, it helps to know about tools like PosteRazor that are just a download away.

Would you like to create a poster (or do you stop at the ink costs)? Which is your favored poster app for the task?

Some people (like me) prefer to have one monitor set directly in front of them and they use it for the main tasks.  They have the second monitor either set to the side or above the main monitor and use it for minor tasks such as referencing and background tasks such as playing music, etc.  Personally, I use it for both plus I toss stuff onto the minor monitor that I want to read later and bring them to the main one when I’m ready to tackle them.

Other people like to use both monitors equally and have a dual monitor configuration where they are positioned more equally in front of them.  They could have two very important tasks that they need to do simultaneously.  I suppose a designer could have tools on one site and a view of the project on the other.  Some people may even have something they’re working on span both monitors.

What I did was scour Flickr to find examples of both approaches to making use of dual monitors.  Let’s take a look and see how it’s done.

1. The Major and Minor Monitor Approach

It appears that nicksieger is using one monitor as the main workstation.  Notice that the keyboard, mouse and light are centered over it and how the second monitor is off to the side.  I’m not totally sure what’s going on but the main monitor seems to have some sort of coding but I don’t know about the second monitor.  Either way, it’s off to the side in more of a referencing or glancing position.

Andy Beal‘s setup has one monitor set to one side in order to keep an eye on social media, etc. and has some browsing going on with the main monitor.  While I do rely on browser plugins (namely Chromed Bird) to keep up with my Twitter fetish, having a secondary monitor to keep an eye on Facebook is very helpful.  Andy seems to be doing something similar.

2. The Two Equal Monitors Approach

smemon87‘s setup is a good example of an equal monitor approach.  He is doing what I do when using WordPress: use one for blogging and the other for previewing.  Basically, if you hit the “Preview” button, you get another tab opening to preview the article.  Pop it into its own window onto the second monitor and it’ll refresh whenever you hit “Preview” again.  Very cool!

memoreks seems to be doing the “browsing in one and email in the other” thing.  For me, I’d have to do one of these at a time.  Basically that’s why I prefer one monitor to be dominant.  If I’m browsing, I’ll pop the browser into the main monitor.  If I’m working on an email, I’ll switch that program over.  Some people prefer to have them both on an even playing field and that’s OK too.

There you have it, both basic approaches with some good examples of each.  Which approach do you prefer?  Or would you rather have both monitors so close it seems they’re looking back at you? Like tmray02‘s setup here.

Let us know your preferred dual monitor configuration.  What do you use your main monitor for?