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Writing the Book on Lighting

“Lighting is a visual entity. You can’t just write about it. You really have to show people." —Randall Whitehead, The Lighting Doctor

Amy McIntosh
10/05/2021
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"Beautiful Light" cover.

If you ask lighting designer and author Randall Whitehead, also known as the Lighting Doctor, about his publishing journey, he’ll sum it up in one concise sentence: “I just decide to do things.”

His career in the lighting industry began before lighting design was its own profession, working first as a documentary photographer on the east coast and later moving to San Francisco and working with an Architectural Digest photographer who also happened to be a lighting designer.

In 1992, Whitehead decided to write a book.

“I went to the bookstore to see what was available in lighting, and there really wasn’t anything,” Whitehead says. “You can have a little section in an interior design book, a little section in an architect’s book, maybe in a book about gardens there would be a couple of pages about lighting, but there was nothing that was really talking about lighting as a separate discipline.”

 

The Publishing Journey

Whitehead’s goal for his first book and for every book he’s published since, is to teach readers about good lighting design.

“I found that everybody can describe bad lighting — it’s not enough, it’s too glary, it’s a weird color, it flutters, it doesn’t dim,” he says. “But if I ask them what is good lighting, they can’t explain it. Good lighting design is
very subtle.”

After shopping his idea around to a few publishers, he found one who was interested. Whitehead’s first books were very picture-heavy, featuring large photographs of installations demonstrating effective lighting design. Although the photos were beautiful, he says, the minimal text did not provide enough information about the principles behind the lighting design. So for his next venture in publishing, Whitehead set out to write a textbook.

“I wanted to write a book that started with the art of lighting, the excitement of lighting, the emotionality of lighting,” he says. “I wanted to tell you, this is what you’re seeing, and this is why you’re seeing it.”

Whitehead self-published the book at first, and it did well on its own. It was even picked up by some colleges and universities as educational material. Once he found a publisher to help with distribution, there was one problem: they didn’t want pictures. Pictures are expensive, Whitehead says, so to please this publisher he wrote, “lots and lots of words, with no pictures.”

Then came the LED revolution. Whitehead had already revised his original textbook once, and the publisher was not interested in a third. Routledge stepped in and asked Whitehead if he’d be interested in writing a new book, one that focused entirely on LEDs. Whitehead agreed, but outlined his list of requirements. He wanted to produce a book on his terms, a book that includes descriptions of lighting principles and techniques with photos and diagrams to accompany the text.

“Lighting is a visual entity,” he says. “You can’t just write about it. You really have to show people. I wanted to show them not only good lighting, but I also wanted to show them bad lighting because you can spend as much money on bad lighting as you do on good lighting. I wanted them to get that understanding, and I finally found a publisher that allowed me to do that.”

 

Beautiful Light

Co-written with Whitehead’s longtime colleague Clifton Lemon, Beautiful Light: An Insider’s Guide to LED Lighting in Homes and Gardens is geared toward anyone interested in furthering their lighting education, from homeowners to interior designers and architects. The book includes information on the fundamentals of lighting design, as well as case studies of lighting techniques in different rooms of the home.

While his original textbook became outdated with the rise of LED technology, Whitehead says this book will stand the test of time. When LEDs first entered the market, there was a lot of trial and error for manufacturers to get it right. LEDs historically had been found as indicator lights in cars and industrial settings, but they were not equipped to light residences. For years as manufacturers tried to bring LED technology to the residential market, it was “kind of a Wild West show,” Whitehead says. The CRI was off, the lumens were too low, and dimming capabilities were subpar. Then came white LEDs, further expanding the technology’s potential. As manufacturers learned more about this tech and shared their knowledge with each other, the potential grew even further to where it is today, which Whitehead says is about as good as it will ever be.

“The colors of light that we like are readily available and will stay consistent, so the reason that the book should come out now is that all of this stuff is standardized,” he says. “It’s pretty close to the best it’s going to get. I would say that at least for the next five years, it’s not going to get any better. In five years, we could rewrite the book and maybe there’s something that’s going to be introduced that’s better than LED, but I don’t think there is.”

The main lighting principle Whitehead hopes readers will take away from this book is a frequent topic in his blog posts and videos, and is what he says is the “secret sauce” for good lighting design: light layering. Readers should understand the four functions of light — task, ambient, accent and decorative — and learn how they work together to effectively illuminate a space.

“People can come away realizing that one fixture by itself will never be the correct solution for the lighting of the space, that they have to look at the four functions of light and apply them to each of the spaces,” Whitehead says. “That’s the most important takeaway is understanding light layering.”

Beautiful Light: An Insider’s Guide to LED Lighting in Homes and Gardens was released August 15, 2021 and is available for purchase at bit.ly/3jGtAt5

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