That would be a HARD design to make. But lenticular artwork design principles should help.
When the blinds are facing inside, they are upside down compared to when facing outside. And the portion of each blind obscured by the overlap is not the same.
That second part is where the lenticular concept would come in to play. And makes the entire design process potentially easier. Now instead of having to have the entire image make sense even when inverted piece-wise, you have some small space which only exists when facing in each direction to play with.
Keep the common visibility segment restricted to vertical lines, and you could make something work fairly easy I think.
yes, for the two-sided viewing idea you would most likely want symmetrical designs, or an image that works in either direction, like this: (but a better image than this one)
Lenticular design principles you mention will apply, and could be dealt with in different ways, especially depending on how wide and thick your slats are. The thin metal ones in the pic above are short (vertically). Wooden ones are often much taller, and so would have a better visible-area:hidden-area ratio. It could be possible to leverage the covered/uncovered areas as the blank areas in a line-based halftone image. That might look cool.
Actually, if you are custom cutting your own blinds (rather than just engraving the existing) you could size them perfectly so that the coverage area is the entire image from the other side.
That image is what you would get if your blind slats were equal in width to the distance between your blind anchors. (This would be far easier to explain if I applied some photoshop-fu, but I am on the way to bed and inherently lazy).
If you make the blinds twice as wide as the distance between anchors, then you have four quadrants to work with. Splitting them up based on the positions when the blinds are open (each slat parallel to the floor):
You would have the top halvesā¦ the half on the window side will be exposed to the outside if the blinds are closed to angle from ceiling to ground. The half on the other side will be exposed to the inside if the blinds are closed to angle from the sky to the floor.
Then you also have the bottom halvesā¦ the half on the window side will be exposed to the outside when closed sky to floor, and the half on the other side exposed to the inside when closed ceiling to ground.
So you have four available images, two for inside and two for outside. And no mandatory shared space at all.
I think the easiest way to figure out the conceptual stuff would be to just take some old dead blinds or a super-cheap small set and start drawing on themā¦
Yea, not fun, but not hard. We have a cat that likes to break our blinds whenever possible, so Iāve had to replace quite a few slats. Love the idea of burning a image on them.
(You have to be careful with that kind of thing, though. One friend used to tell the story of the cat who was in the room when he was playing with a projector and put a floor-to-ceiling high-contrast pic of a lion on the wall. tl;dr: cat essentially never came out from under the furniture again, not even to use a litterbox.)
