Up now through February 4, 2024, at the Cooper Hewitt in New York City, is A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes. This exhibit is an absolute must-see for any lover of weaving, textiles, or just good design. Dorothy Liebes was a prolific and influential designer whose work was revolutionary in […]
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Textile design is a complex, fascinating, and ancient field of study. Every human on this planet is intimately involved with textiles, yet very few people consider textiles much at all. For thousands of years, all over the world, textiles protected us, comforted us, and gave us a way to communicate information about ourselves with the […]
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Trends impact every aspect of our lives. At Design Pool, we are endlessly fascinated by them and their impact on the culture at large. Yet, as the speed of our daily lives has gotten faster, trends seem to be cycling faster too. It got us thinking, how much energy do we need to put into […]
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Summer is officially here, NeoCon 2022 is officially over. We all deserve a little downtime, right? As I stare down the huge pile of books begging to be read, I’m thinking back to a few favorites that have been inspiring the Design Pool team lately. In unique ways, each of these five books offered a […]
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Textile lovers in the northeast should absolutely add a visit to the Montclair Museum of Art to their holiday break to-do list. Their featured exhibit, Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles closes on January 2, 2022. This exhibit, which originally opened at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, is a breathtaking collection of Navajo (Diné) […]
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Designers Today is a digital and print magazine that promotes itself as the link between interior designers and the home furnishings industry. As part of their goal in pushing the envelope to make the interior design profession stronger and more transparent, they are hosting a yearlong webinar series that interviews experts on their business practices. […]
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What could possibly be meant by the term The Inca Insistence? I will get to this! First, I have to explain how patterns are categorized and how this is culturally relevant. Previously in this blog, we have discussed basic pattern repeats. An ogee, such as this image below (and which we defined here), is an […]
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“I have to find a light somewhere,” thought Luise Stromberg as spring turned to summer in 2020. Like most of us, Luise was spending most of her time home and was searching for a creative spark to get her through the dark time we were all experiencing. So, she turned to a passion of hers, […]
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Humans have been turning fibers into materials with which to clothe themselves, warm themselves and express themselves for millennia. Still, there are certain moments in time we can point to as having made huge impacts on the way textiles are made. The invention of the cotton gin and then of the spinning jenny are two […]
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As a textile designer, one of the best tools in my designer toolbox is my texture library. Designing patterns digitally, I sometimes felt the patterns looked a little flat. To breathe life into a pattern, I add texture to a design instead of a flat color. This technique optimizes a pattern by adding depth and […]
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Picking the right material to use for digital printing is an important one. If you’re working with print-on-demand companies or thinking about customizing materials for your next project, you know there are a lot of options out there. That’s the fun of customizing! Still, it’s a lot to take in if you’re new to materials […]
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Occasionally at Design Pool I receive a request to replicate an antique textile and I rarely say no. In fact, I love these projects so much I usually find it hard to control my excitement. Recreating an antique textile is more than just knocking something off, it is an intense design challenge that involves research […]
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If it wasn’t obvious by now, I’m a pattern lover! I love designing patterns and surrounding myself with them in my home. (Not to mention wearing them!) As a result, I often get questions from friends and clients about how best to coordinate patterns in a room or project. I’m not an interior designer, however, […]
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Everyone at Design Pool may have different roles, but we all have one thing in common. We all have degrees in textile design. When people ask the standard cocktail party question, “What do you do?” answering, “I’m a textile designer” is nearly always a surprise, which kind of blows our minds. We surround ourselves in […]
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At Design Pool, we like to say that our creative process is client-driven. We do this work because we love to see our designs find their way into a client’s product and out into the marketplace. Founder Kristen Dettoni does the majority of the design work for Design Pool and is passionate about creating a […]
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Computer software may make it easy to take a motif and tile it out, but that doesn’t mean that a pattern has been designed in a pattern repeat. In fact, a skilled pattern designer can spot a design that has just been tiled out and not designed in a pattern repeat from a mile away. […]
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