In this post I’m sharing some thoughts about why I’m designing so many photographic patterns and what I find so intriguing about them. Okay, the first reason is going to be – because it’s easy, right? You don’t have to take pretty photos to use some elements from them, you don’t have to have amazingly detailed hand-drawings and the skills to make those, you just snap something interesting and play with it in Photoshop until it becomes a pattern you can put on an object.

But that process of course can be quite tricky, and it has limits in applications or using them for anything else other than digitally printed stuff. So why am I still doing it (apart from that because it’s easy)? The thing is, photos give you a full picture of something that can only be achieved by drawing if you’re really really meticulous. Photos have a „mood” themselves which you can take through your object by making a repeat from them. I don’t use the colours, the scales or everything on the photos of course, but I’m trying to keep the mood with whatever I do. I like keeping the context and give the full picture of something, giving as much information as possible (but not necessarily with too many tools, it can be decoded from quite a little usually.)

I’m also quite an impatient person and if something is inspiring, I like working with it immediately – no sketching, no drawing, not too many further studies, just play with it until it becomes a thing. Perhaps this is amateurish, but I bet a lot of old professional designers would have done the same thing had the technology been available to them. Photos are documents of not just place but time, you catch something in a particular moment, and that you can take it through to an object, or an interior.

In short, photos, and a digital way of creating patterns can make a designer preserve the mood that attracted to them to take the picture in the first place, and applying them onto surfaces as patterns can create new atmospheres, and new interiors, with that intention, the initial inspiration intact. So, that’s why I’m sharing some of these old fabrics I made nearly 10 years ago both here and on my Instagram – because I’m selling them on print.one and in 2019, the intention is to keep producing many more of these projects.