Output details

Aram 0915x

The digital design aram 0915x uses a staple of printed textile design, the floral, combining it with a simple repetitive pattern and a series shapes created using generative and random processes. The research explores how designers have increasingly gravitated to the use of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, in almost all cases treating the software at face value. However complex their uses of these programmes, all options are made from a fixed set of menus. This research, in contrast, looks at using random elements or coding (programming) to open up the design possibilities available for digital printing onto fabric.

The project sits within Russell’s ongoing exploration of the re-contextualisation of traditional textile imagery. Collectively, this study has examined how design content that has a history of use in printed textiles or surface pattern might be located in a contemporary context by generating work that explores a variety of new digital processes. The overall aim has been to develop new methods of accommodating technical advances into the design process.

The design has featured in a number of surveys or other texts on contemporary printed textile design including Briggs-Goode and Townsend’s Textile design: principles, advances and applications and Dawber’s New Fashion Print. A digital fabric print of the design was exhibited in the Power of Copying show at Xuzhou Museum of Art, China. It has been exhibited at a range of international trade fairs, including Premiere Vision (Europe’s largest trade fair for fashion fabrics and textile design) Paris, 2009. Clients purchasing or commissioning work featuring other examples of this research include Alexander Henry, C and A, Carven, Etam, Jack and Jones, H and M, Lee, Levi Strauss, Moschino, Oilily, Roberto Cavalli, Thomas Pink, Tommy Hilfiger and Vero Moda.