Hasta La Ideas

To some, an art form. To others, common sense. To the messy outsider, pointless de-jumbling. As a savvy designer or design enthusiast, you’re most certainly familiar with the principles and outcomes of knolling, even if you had no idea it deserved its own word. As the story goes, knolling got verbed by the fastidious janitor at Frank Gehry’s furniture shop, who would make sure all tools and materials were 90-degreed at the end of the day, mirroring rigid angles and clean lines of Knoll furniture they produced. It was picked up by the artist Tom Sachs while he worked there. Sachs institutionalized the principle in his own work and defined in his virally adored “10 Bullets”:

But knolling means more than just tidying a space by aligning tools to each other or their creative confines. Through neatness, it suggests an improvement to functionality, accessibility and efficiency. In a way it’s like making your workspace into a 3D exploded diagram. Which is awesome.

Although well-organized spaces and prettily arranged items are in no way new, the hyper tidy appeal of knolling is definitely on the rise. It’s seeped into every visual form you can imagine. Infographics, advertising, fashion blogs, cookbooks, whole dedicated tumblrs, merchandising, photography collections. And Pinterest… Pinterest everywhere.

Big Improvement

So much easier to use!

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