Do you want to be able to change people’s moods purely with your designs? Do you want to understand what creates an atmosphere in a space? It’s time you understood Lighting Design. 

Lighting Design is one the best ways you can control how someone feels in a space. It is the unsung hero of the design world, and it’s impact is often overlooked. Yet light can do so much for our design work, like give feeling, focus your attention or even provide instructions.

At Nollie, we want to show you exactly how the different fields of Design can work together and how they overlap, we do this through our 12 Principles of Interdisciplinary Design. By understanding these principles you can expand your creative skillset and develop a better understanding of Design as whole.  

Designing for Atmosphere?

Lighting is the unsung hero of the design world. It is one of the few Design practices that directly impacts your mood and creates an atmosphere in an environment. 

Many areas of Design overlap with Lighting Design, and knowing how to use Lighting in your work can allow you to manipulate spaces and objects to provide information, give ambiance, and focus your attention on different areas within a space.

You can use what you learn from this post to understand how to use light in your work and apply it in its own right but also to provide signals in your Industrial Designs, create a vibe in an Interior space, or use it to create something dynamic with Interactive Design, like the TeamLab gallery in Tokyo.

What is Lighting Design?

Lighting Design is about using light in a functional and meaningful way. It can be used to create comfortable and engaging spaces, it can be used to direct your attention and it even direct you to do things at certain times, like how we use traffic lights.

Good Lighting Design must be functional, have direction, create spaces and establish colour. These are the 4 Pillars of Good Lighting. 

Light has a direct impact on our mood, and knowing how to use that in your design work will allow you to impact how people feel about your work.

You often don’t appreciate lighting, but it directly impacts your mood and how you feel in an environment. Dark spaces feel creepy and claustrophobic, whereas brightly lit spaces feel welcoming and engaging.

While Lighting is often talked about in regards to the environment, it can also be used in other ways to benefit your design work. For example, it can be used to display signals and provide information. 

If you’re wondering what I mean by this, think of how gadgets have a light to indicate that their switched on.

People understand and perceive things through the use of light, so why not add it consciously into your design work?

Why Generalist Designers Should Learn Lighting Design

Lighting Design is a vital tool that can be used by interdisciplinary designers in several ways. By understanding Lightin you can enhance your creative work to create mood, atmosphere and instruction.

At Nollie we want you to understand how all the fields of Design overlap and interact with each other, through our 12 Principles Framework. Here are a few ways that Lighting Design can enhance your overall Design ability:

Change The Perception of a Space

Lighting Design does a great job of manipulating a viewers impression of a space. Rooms can seem larger with more natural light, or cosy and inviting with dimmed lighting. The mood can be altered by adding colors, and it can reflect differently off of the materials and textures within a space.

This will help massively with Interior Design projects. Lighting can be used to create a mood in a space, create focal points and improve the way the space is intended to function.

Alter Mood and Create Atmosphere

Lighting has a big on impact on how you perceive spaces. It changes your mood, and creates an atmosphere. With lighting Design you can consider what kind of mood and atmosphere you want to create. 

By changing the colours, intensity, and changing the light you can make spaces change and become more dynamic. 

One of the best examples of this, comes from the Team Labs Interactive Art Gallery in Tokyo. Just looking at the spaces within provides an understanding of how your meant to feel in that space.

In this case, there’s a lot of similarities between Lighting Design and Interactive Design. You can create spaces that change depending on where people are in the space and use light as a way to make those changes.

Highlight Visual Communication

One of the biggest areas where lighting and visual communication intersect is through signage. Lighting can be used in backlit signage, in wayfinding and branding. 

For those of you coming here with a Graphics background, lighting has many overlaps with Graphic Design. When you’re working on a branding project, you’ll need to understand how you can implement lighting for the client.

For example, can the logo be made into a 3D backlit sign that would suit a storefront? Are there wayfinding graphics like emergency exits or similar that require lighting? 

Improving User Exprience

Lighting can be used a way of communicating an important detail. It can be used a way for the user to understand whether or not something is working or even provide instruction.

Many of us know this experience. For example, when your charging a device and a little light comes on it lets you know that the charger is working. A red light could symbolise that something might not be right with a device and it needs to be repaired.

Using Lighting in this way helps streamline the user experience and can be useful for UX projects and Industrial Design. It helps the user understand what’s going on and create a more engaging experience.

The History of Lighting Design

Like a lot of things in the modern world, Lighting and using it in a functional way dates back to ancient Greece. Their ancient theatres were built in huge open air spaces, that were placed with the sun behind the audience to reduce glare and immunate the stage.

In the 16th Century, Italian Architect Sebastiano Serlio, suggested enhancing these open air spaces by using candles as another way to illuminate the stage and enhance the performace. This method began being used everywhere and lead to the invention of chandeliers. 

Lighting went from candles, to oil lamps to gas lamps until along came Thomas Edison. While he is often miscredited for inventing the lightbulb, what he actually did was improve it, patent it and sold them by the truckload. Lightbulbs were now everywhere.

Between the 1870s and 1880s, several European cities began to install lightbulbs on popular shopping streets. Due to the cost of them at the time, cities were questioning whether they could have one giant light that lit up the whole city. 

You can still find some relics of these “moonlight towers” in the world today, like in Austin, Texas.

Thankfully every city doesn’t have a giant lighthouse in the centre anymore, but we still see lighting deployed everywhere. Lighting played a huge role in making streets safer at night, and helped create a visual identity in the streets.

These lighting systems used Halogen gas bulbs, but became cheaper to produce after the invention of the Tungsten filament lightbulbs in the early 20th century. This opened a new door for innovative lighting solutions and created a new breed of Lighting Designers, like Louis Kalff.

Lighting would change forever after the invention of the LED bulb in 1962. This light source could produce more light for longer periods while using less energy. This bulb has changed Lighting Design forever and in the 1980s and 1990s, we began to see it being used more and more.

Now LEDs are everywhere, from the billboards on Times Square to the head lights on your car. They are cheap to get your hands on, they can change color and can be programmed making them brilliant for interdisciplinary design projects.

What Do I Need to Know

Task Lighting

Task Lighting is providing direct light to help you perform a task, like reading, cooking, studying and things like that. You need a light source to what you’re doing properly.

Task Lighting could be categorised by a bunch of lighting styles we’re all familiar with, like table and floor lamps, wall mounted lighting, pendants and under cabinet lights that help illuminate a work surface to help you see while you cook.

Accent Lighting

Accent Lighting is using light to illuminate areas or objects in a space. Accent lighting is used as a way to highlight spaces, architectural features or artwork in people’s homes and in public spaces. 

Unlike Task Lighting which provides like to get a task done, or Ambient Lighting which is used to brighten a whole space, Accent Lighting is used to add layers and engage the viewer’s eyes by drawing their attention to different points in a space.

This could come from Track Lights, spotlights, wall-mounted fixtures and recessed lighting.

Ambient (or General) Lighting

Ambient Lighting is about how to fully light a space. It is the primary source of light in a room and it illuminates the whole space. For example, in your bedroom, the main light would be the Ambient Lighting. 

You can use different colours, dimmers, and various lighting fixtures to create different moods for different rooms. For example, you need brighter cooler ambient lighting in a kitchen compared to a bedroom.

Direct and Indirect Lighting

Direct Lighting is when a light is shone on one specific area. Task Lighting is a from of directional light as it allows the person to clearly see what they’re doing. 

Indirect Lighting refers to light that is spread throughout the space. Ambient Lighting is a form of Indirect Lighting. 

Indirect Lighting could also include concealed lighting. Rather than having the light shine into a space, it uses reflective surfaces to bounce the light, which provides a subtle way for the light to reach us.

You should layer different forms of direct and indirect lighting in your space.

Daylighting

Daylighting is just a fancy name for using daylight in a space. During the day it is important to understand how the sun will provide light into a space. 

As humans, our brains absolutely love natural light. We love it so much that our brain releases a chemical called Serotonin when our eyes see natural light, which improves our mood!

You can use natural light to make spaces feel bigger, warmer and homely. Without it it makes us feel closed in and claustrophobic. 

Understanding how to add natural light through windows and skylights to allow more natural light into a space. In Interior Design, even just adding a mirror can do wonders for improving the amount of natural light that enters a space.

Lumens

Lumens are the measurement of light and how brightly a light shines. The more electrical power that enters the lightbulb (measured in Watts) the more Lumens the lightbulb will produce. 

With the introduction of LEDs we are seeing bulbs that can now produce a larger amount of Lumens with a lower amount of electricity.

The Design Process

Understanding the Design Process is one of the best ways to understand how to build interdisciplinary skills. The Design Process can be adapted to fit different design projects, so you always will know what you need to to do to get to the next stage, even if the project is totally new to you. 

By creating a Process thats adaptable, you can begin to work on projects outside of your comfort zone and build your creative skills.

Brief Interpretation and Planning

The first stage of any project is to fully understand what’s required of you as a Designer, and making a plan to deliver those requirements on time and on budget. 

Make sure you fully understand the brief and write back to you your client with your interpretation. This ensures you are both on the same page and keep you on track throughout the project.

Plan out your project as much as possible to ensure you meet your deadlines. Know when you need to move on to the next stage and plan your time accordingly.

With Lighting Design, you’ll want to know what mood your client wants to create in a space, what needs emphasised, what needs to be hidden and the how sunlight will impact the space during the day. 

Research

What separates good designers from the mediocre, is that good designers understand WHY they took the creative decisions that they took throughout the project, and can back up that understanding with research they carried out in the early stages of the project. 

As designers, we are problem solvers. Therefore you should fully understand the problem you are trying to solve. Has anyone done it before? Could it be improved? Could it be done in a totally different way? Meet the people that this problem impacts.

Go out and talk with experts in your area, potential customers, read books and get information from credible sources. The more you learn about the problem, the easier you’ll be able to solve it.

Keep all your findings in your Design Specification and refer to it throughout your project. A Design Specification is best for keeping track of the numbers behind a project.

In Lighting Design, you’ll want to understand what you are wanting to highlight and why. Understand the space that your lighting will impact and how people will use the space. What type of lighting do they need? 

Concepts

Now it’s time to start getting creative! Once you have an understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, you can begin coming up with ideas to solve them. With a pen and paper, draw as many ideas down as you can. 

In your sketchbook, draw small and draw fast, and make each idea different from the last. Many designers can get overwhelmed at this stage, but the trick is to not judge your ideas when your drawing them down. Do that afterwards.

Sketch out as many ideas as you can and try to include different fixtures, types of lighting and control systems that you can use to enhance the Atmosphere of the space you’re dealing with.

Development

The Development stage is about taking your idea from paper to something that could exist in the real world. By the end of this stage you want to have something that pretty much resembles your final idea for your client.

Start by creating rough and ready prototypes, note any ways you can improve it and refine and repeat. Prototyping is one of the vital parts of any design process. The purpose of a prototype is to make any changes quickly and cheaply so start with something basic first.

As you progress through the development stage you can begin to create more comprehensive prototypes that become closer and closer to the final idea in your head. 

For a Lighting Design project you should refine and test your ideas to ensure they work for your intended space.

Detail

By the time you come to the end of the development stage of the project, you should know have a pretty solid idea of your final project. Take some time before presenting it to your client to tidy up any little details. 

They say the devils in the detail, so what could be done to enhance your lighting project and how can you improve the way you present it to your client? Anything you can do to improve the way you present your idea can be done in this stage.

For designers this will mean coming up with a lighting layout and specifications that you can give to the installation team as instructions. If you are programming your lights to display animations or something along those lines, you want to ensure your sequence is correct.

Pitch

Now that you have a final idea, its time to pitch to your client. Remember, take the time to explain your design process and the deliberate creative decisions you had to make along the way. You can use your Design Specification to help you.

Clients want to be impressed, and will likely come from a business background rather than a creative one. So you can use your creativity to create a dynamic presentation, perhaps you can include animated elements or even Virtual Reality to demonstrate your idea. Dazzle them and leave them wanting more.

Fully demonstrate the features of your idea, any instructions and a little bit about your journey to come up with the solution.

Promotion

At the end of every project you should take the time to add it to your portfolio. Your portfolio is the most important document you own as a designer, and it’s a common bad habit in the industry to not keep it up to date.

You can use social media to celebrate your ideas and build a following. Post your work across your website, and design platforms like Dribbble and Behance. Many designers and clients use these platforms so it’s one of the best places to be spotted for new opportunities.

If you have an Adobe subscription, you’ll be able to build your own portfolio website for free with Adobe Portfolio.

What Tools Do I Need?

Design Sketchbook

For every project, you’ll need somewhere to put down your ideas. In Lighting Design, you want to show the areas you want to illuminate and any areas you want to draw your viewers attention.

You’ll want to use an A3 (or Tabloid size) sketchbook to give you plenty of room to sketch your ideas and add annotations.

We’ll go into the different drawings styles that can be found within Design in a later post. So check out our Newsletter to be kept up to date!

Design Journal

A Design Journal is one of the best kept secrets in the Design world and if you didn’t go to a Design or Art School, you might not fully understand how important they are. Luckily we’re here to show you how you can use one!

From experience, it is the most important design tool I own and it should become yours too.

A Design Journal is a place where you can write down any new information, your research, advice, your goals, new techniques, to-do lists, etc. Literally, anything that you think could be useful to you later, write it down.

It doesn’t matter what you write in your journal, as much as how consistently you use it. Try to write something every day, and you’ll soon start seeing the benefits. It will keep you on track for projects, help you remember things later down the line, and show you’re progress.

If you want to learn more about keeping a Design Journal, you can check out this post.

DiaLux

DiaLux is a free software that is used for Lighting Design projects. It is a powerful tool that allows you to create 3D environments and experiment with different lighting solutions.

DiaLux has plenty of tools that allow you to see the specifics of your lighting solution like illuminance, luminance, and uniformity. It also helps you consider ways to reduce the energy consumption of your lighting layout.

WIthin DiaLux you can add lighting designs from real brands.

You can download DiaLux for free by following this link.

Adobe Creative Cloud

We highly recommend Adobe for Interdisciplinary Designers, purely as it comes with over 20 different apps including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. 

For Lighting Design, Photoshop will be the tool you’ll use the most. When creating visual presentations for clients, you want your work to look as good as possible. That’s why you should use Photoshop to help enhance your visuals.

Photoshop can be used to alter an images lighting levels, colors and intensities to create something an image that is close to real life. You can add shadows, and demonstrate how your work will look.

We also recommend an Adobe subscription as it gives you a free website you can use for your portfolio. With Adobe Portfolio, you can create a website to host all of your visual work. 

Conclusion

Lighting is important. Understanding more about how to implement lighting in your design work can allow you to create atmospheric spaces and improve the User Experience of your designs.

By understanding Lighting Design, you’ll have a head start on other designers as this is a field of Design that’s often overlooked, but has a strong impact on people. It can influence their mood, their decision making and their perception of a space.

At Nollie, we want you to understand that all Design is linked and that you can adapt your creativity based on the projects that you want to work on, whether or not you went to a fancy design school. We do this because we love Design, and we want you to too!

By learning from the different areas of design, you’ll learn where these areas overlap. Once you know that, it will make transitioning between different projects much easier.

If you want to explore more why not check out our 12 Principles of Interdisciplinary Design post?