Romance of Shadows, Curiosity of Vertical Planes 

Illumination and Proximity are 2 of the 12 languages of the mind.

Your feelings about an item are affected by the way it’s illuminated.

Feelings of romance, intimacy, prestige and adventure are triggered by the hot spots and shadows of a campfire, a fireplace or a candle in a dimly lit room. Hot spots and shadows send signals that are rich, textured and varied. Upscale retail stores and restaurants, museums and cathedrals are filled with hot spots and shadows.

Feelings of drudgery, routine, commodity and bureaucracy are triggered by the homogenized light that fills every corner of a room equally. Discount stores and cafeterias, elementary schools and post offices are filled with homogenized light. Homogenized light is the same all over. No hot spots. No shadows.

Feng Shui – the ancient Chinese practice of arranging rooms and furnishings to create specific moods and feelings – is built upon an intuitive understanding of the language of Proximity.

The arrangement of furniture and fixtures within a room can pull you along a specific path as surely as if you were walking within a labyrinth.

A boring store has 3 horizontal planes. The bottom one is the floor. The top one is the ceiling. The center one in a clothing store is the top of the clothes racks. In a large jewelry store, it's the tops of the showcases. In Best Buy, the tops of the shelves.

To make a big room feel interesting and intimate, all you have to do is pierce that center, horizontal plane with a series of vertical planes rising to varying heights. If your view is partially obscured by three tall pots standing 9 feet tall, you'll feel drawn to take a look at what’s behind them. But if you can see everything from a single vantage point, the brain says, “Nothing here to see.”

By the way, these techniques work just as well in homes and offices as they do in retail stores.

Was this stuff interesting for you or did it go over your head? Send a quick email to Tamara@WizardAcademy.org and let her know.

I confess we took only a shallow look into a deep subject today, but if enough people thought today’s memo was beneficial, we’ll schedule a class and a field trip to investigate detailed examples of how the careful placement of selected fixtures can cause customers to visit you more often and spend longer amounts of time.

We’ll also look at how shadows can change the mood of a room and increase the perceived value of inventory. We might even investigate the language of color and how visual portals can be used to move people from one state of consciousness to another.

But now I’m rambling.

Wizard Academy is a new kind of business school. We study what gifted people do when they’re feeling inspired so that we can reverse engineer their unconscious methods.

What are you trying to make happen? Let us help you.

Come to Wizard Academy.

Roy H. Williams