Inspiration to Reality - Behind the Scenes Secrets of the Design Process

Back in the day when I started in this biz, I spent hours and hours cutting and pasting fabric swatches, paint samples et al to a massive board to present design concepts to clients. 
Now thanks to wonderful design friendly sites and tools like Pinterest, Houzz and Olioboard, those days are long gone. *Cue here for my hallelujah dance!
We now save inspiration rooms/photos to Pinterest in lieu of cutting and storing a gazillion pages from a magazine, I also share an Ideabook(a collection of rooms by style or function) on Houzz to get a sense of a client's likes or dislikes. Once that's all done, we move on to create an inspiration board, on Olioboard, a wonderful design program that allows you to virtually cut and paste your project ideas, and then print or email to clients. The basic program is free but there is a small monthly fee to upgrade to the professional level so you can access paint swatches, budget tools etc..
Here are some of projects usually we recently completed that first came to life as an inspiration board.

 

There you have it, some behind the scenes secrets of the trade that you too can use to make your design life much, much easier. 
P.S. the amazing Emily Henderson recently shared some killer design friendly apps over at her blog. If you're using a friendly online design tool please feel free to share with us as well. 
Now, go forth and make your lives so much easier. Happy Hump Day ya'll.