top of page
Weekly Lighting Tips
Discover weekly lighting tips from Sketch Lighting covering architectural lighting, interior design, luxury spaces, lighting technology, product selection, installation guidance, and practical design insights. Whether you're an architect, interior designer, lighting consultant, or homeowner, explore expert advice that helps you create beautiful, functional, and well-planned lighting solutions.
The Vocabulary of Light
Thirty weeks. Thirty foundational ideas. One complete vocabulary for thinking, talking, and designing with light. Here is what you now know — and why it changes everything that follows.
2 min read
Light Is Not a Utility — The Case for Treating It as a Material
Somewhere in the history of construction, light was reduced to a line item. This is the single most expensive misconception in the built environment — and here is the evidence.
2 min read
Why Every Lighting Brief Starts With the Sun
Before a single luminaire is specified, the most important question in any lighting brief is what the natural light does in this space, at what times, and in what seasons. Everything else follows from that answer.
2 min read
Natural Light as the Reference Standard in Lighting Design
Every lamp ever manufactured has been compared against one benchmark it has never fully matched. Understanding what natural light actually is — and what it does — makes you a better specifier of everything else.
2 min read
How Light Makes a Space Feel Smaller — And When That Is the Goal
Everything that makes a space feel larger works in reverse — and sometimes that is exactly what a space needs. Intimacy is a design objective, and light is its instrument.
2 min read
How Light Makes a Space Feel Larger
Light does not change the dimensions of a room. But it absolutely changes the experience of them. Here is the specific technique that makes spaces read as larger than they are.
2 min read
Why Dark Rooms Cost More to Light Than White Ones
The colour of your walls is a lighting budget decision. Most clients do not know this — and most designers forget to say it. Here is what reflectance costs in fixtures, energy, and maintenance.
2 min read
Room Geometry and How It Dictates Light Distribution
A square room and a long narrow corridor require completely different lighting strategies — even at identical floor areas. Room geometry is not background context. It is the brief.
2 min read
How Ceiling Height Changes Your Entire Lighting Strategy
The single variable that changes almost every other lighting decision is one most people never think about until it is too late to change it. Here is how to design for ceiling height from the start.
2 min read
Contrast Ratio in Lighting — How to Use It With Intention
Your eye does not perceive brightness in absolute terms. It perceives brightness relative to everything around it. Contrast ratio is the tool that puts that perception to work.
2 min read
Light and Shadow — The Design Element Everyone Forgets
The most common mistake in lighting design is not too little light. It is too much — leaving no room for shadow. Here is why shadow is not the absence of good lighting, but an essential part of it.
2 min read
Glare — Why It Is a Contrast Problem, Not a Brightness Problem
Squinting is not discomfort. It is your eye's defence mechanism activating — and it means your lighting has failed. Here is what glare actually is and how to design against it.
2 min read
The Purkinje Effect — Why Colours Shift at Night
As light fades, colours do not just get darker — they shift. If you have never consciously noticed this, you will not be able to explain why some spaces look wrong at night even when the lighting seems adequate.
2 min read
Photopic vs Scotopic Vision — Your Eye Has Two Visual Systems
Your eye operates two entirely different visual systems depending on the light level. Most lighting design only accounts for one of them — and that gap has real consequences for low-light environments.
2 min read
How the Human Eye Adapts to Light and Darkness
Your eye is not a camera with a fixed exposure. It constantly, silently adjusts — and that adaptation process has direct, practical consequences for every space you design.
2 min read
The Light Source Family Tree — Filament, Arc, and LED
Every light source ever made works by one of three principles. Knowing which is which tells you the failure modes, the performance ceiling, and the replacement strategy for everything you specify.
2 min read
Luminaire, Lamp, Fixture — Do You Know the Difference?
Three words used interchangeably on site every day. They do not mean the same thing — and using them correctly leads to faster problem-solving, cleaner specifications, and fewer errors.
2 min read
Direct vs Indirect Lighting — When to Use Each
The direction light travels before it reaches your eye changes everything about how a space feels. Understanding the difference between direct and indirect light is fundamental to designing spaces that perform and feel right.
2 min read
Reflectance — How Your Surfaces Shape Your Light
You can have a perfect lighting scheme on paper and a dim, flat space in reality — if you ignored reflectance. Every surface in your project is either amplifying your investment or absorbing it.
2 min read
Luminance — What Your Eye Actually Sees
Lux measures light falling on a surface. Luminance measures light leaving it. Confusing the two is one of the most common errors in lighting specification — and it has real consequences.
2 min read
bottom of page