Let me tell you somethin’, these are the bookshelves that people are gonna talk about at every party and on every design blog for years to come. Not the ones across town, not the shelves you could’ve arranged if you had worked harder. These shelves. There is a joy to color, is there not? And there is satisfaction in gradations well done.

I know this isn’t easy sir, ma’am. But this is where we’re at right now. Huddle up. I said, huddle up! Hold hands if you want to.

Give us all gathered here the strength to keep the yellows loyal to the oranges instead of the greens. It’s what they must do. Give us the strength to be decisive about where the black, gray and white books go. It’s important. And give us the strength to remember that our egos are so very fragile. Our self-esteem, it’s vulnerable. And we will all, at some point in our lives, be judged.

We must carry this in our hearts, that knowledge that we will be smirked at. And yes, we will be eye rolled over. And what we love most, our things, our mood boards, and our felted banners, can be taken from us. They can be taken from us through envy, they can be taken from us through judgment. And they can be taken from us through just damn not doin’ it right. And when they are taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. It’s at these times that we need to look deep inside ourselves. So that we may look right back outside ourselves, to the surface. To the very shallow surfaces of our environment. And our character.

When you made a first pass at this, everybody wrote you off. Everybody. They called you amateurs. And I’m not gonna lie, they called you colorblind. But look where you are now. You can see the path ahead. And you know what’s at the end of that path? You, with a camera and some natural light, takin’ some damn photos to send to Design*Sponge. For what? So you can have 200,000 more people write you off. That’s just who you are. But remember there are people who believe in you, a few who’d never give up on you. When you take to those shelves, when you’re trying to figure out which books are red-orange and which are orange-red, those are the people I want in your minds. Those are the people I want in your hearts. Those are the people you should have on your vision board. And I’m one of them. Here’s my picture. I believe in you.

You listen to me, right here, right now. What I’m sayin’ is you need to try to be better than everybody else. I didn’t say you actually need to be better, but you gotta try. That’s what arranging things by color is. It’s in the tryin’. And it’s in the sorting. It’s in the shade selection and it sure as hell is in the transition between color families. How you make a shelf of green be more than just a shelf of green, it’s how you make it feel like a field of Texas grass in that warm late afternoon light. It’s in how you vary those blues so they go from that deep sweet spot in a crisp cold lake to a crystal clear sky on game day. And it’s in how you make that weird patch of brown books over there feel like the sun-warmed hides of a herd of cattle grazin’ as the day dawns. Look, I’m not sayin’ it’s easy. But it’s what needs to be done.

Can you do that for me?

Good. Now get to it. And after I walk out that door I want you to remember our time together, when we accomplished the impossible. When Jim over here got practically balls deep in a Pantone chip book so we could sort 700 books into piles with color variations so slight that only a dog could hear ‘em. You should feel real proud, both of you. You are champions.

So let’s hear it:

Open eyes

Full hands

All the hues