Print and Pattern Geometric. Review.

Print and Pattern Geometric

By Bowie Style

Laurence King Publishing 2015

Paperback £19.95

ISBN-978-1-780674148

Star rating: ****

Today I am featuring a mega-dose of design inspiration – Print and Pattern Geometric – the latest compendium of themed print designs from Bowie Style, a.k.a. Marie Perkins of http://printpattern.blogspot.co.uk/.You don’t have to be a design pro to appreciate the wonders within the covers of this title. If you are a weekend crafter needing some direction for a project colourway – find it here. Perhaps you are looking to liven up the look of your projects – new shapes, new arrangements. Print and Pattern Geometric has plenty of ideas to give direction.

No doubt when you hear the word “geometrics” you conjure up visions of severe, hard-edged shapes and bright, unforgiving colours. Well, this title will certainly shake things up for you. Here, the “geometrics” umbrella covers swirls and pinwheels, grids and dots, stars and ogees. The designs – and colourways – are influenced by current trends – hexagons (big in scrapbooking), and tribal and ethnic influences, such as Aztec and Native American, and Scandi (also big in scrapbooking).

The book is a collection of designs from a global selections of the best and brightest surface pattern designers. There are pics of the patterns themselves as well as prints applied to end products, such as notebooks, giftwrap, and textiles. So you don’t view the designs in a vacuum, the designs are accompanied by capsule bios of the designers featuring lifestyle details and sources of influence (design heroes)!

This book is energy-charged. The pages sing. Expect the unexpected, such as Nolita Chevrons by Khristian A Howell. Here, sharp chevrons are tamed with lace edges and lots of dots. There are designs with watercolour effects, and doodle-like designs. From here on in, “geometrics” has a wider brief.

Plus features of the book include quality paper and careful crediting of designs. The designer’s name is given bottom-of-page, making the book ideal for browsing. Flip – then zoom in on what catches your eye.

Other titles in the Print & Pattern series include Print & Pattern, Print & Pattern 2,and Print & Pattern Kids.  

I Love Handmade Books, by Charlotte Rivers. Review.

I Love Handmade Books

Timeless Techniques and Fresh Ideas for Beautiful Handmade Books

By Charlotte Rivers

Jacqui Small 2014

Hardback £14.99

ISBN 978 1 909342651

Star rating: ****

A handcrafted book is the perfect antidote to e-book overload.  Small wonder that this artisan craft is  enjoying a revival.  Practitioners of bookcraft have given it a playful contemporary spin – you won’t find any fusty Morocco-bound volumes in Charlotte Rivers’ magical appreciation of handmade books. Instead, you will find imaginative, innovative design treatments that stretch the boundaries of what a book is. Perhaps not thinking “outside the binding”, but redefining the concept of what a book can be.

The author sees book-making as an umbrella craft, “which can incorporate illustration, graphic design, design, photography, papercraft and many other creative disciplines.” (My italics.) Books being primarily paper-based, there is much here to fascinate the papercrafter.

The heart of the book showcases the work of bookbinding talent worldwide. You will find whimsical creations such as the layer cake slice-books from Boundless Bookbindery of Vienna. There’s lots of spectacular origamic fancy folding and paper manipulation to see. The “display” chapters are Folded Bindings, Sewn Bindings, Page and Cover Treatments, and Experimental Packaging (the title of  last chapter is particularly enticing). The chapter on sewn bindings is delightful, highlighting many clever ways to combine form and function – such as the stitched butterfly binding by Becca Hirsbrunner of Arlington, Texas. Another book of hers has stitching that looks like a suspension bridge span. Nice work. With each entry you get soundbites from the artist/studio about their mission statements.

All very lovely. But wait – tucked away at the back of the book is the Book-Making in Practice chapter – a hidden treasure trove of how-to goodness. Here, you will find a carefully curated selection of D-I-Y projects giving a taster of the myriad skills that bookbinding encompasses.  Learn to make a Flag Book, a Dragon Book, or a Secret Message Book – each is a showstopper of paper manipulation (can’t wait to have a go!). Try your hand at several stitching methods. Learn how to make a padded Pillow Book, and how to stiffen fabric for use as book covering material. And more. 

The Resource section at the end of the book contains useful info aplenty. You will find lists of specialist suppliers of bookbinding materials and equipment, blogs, and references. There’s also a glossary and an index.

So, job well done to Charlotte Rivers, who has come up with a winning follow-up to her equally delightful previous title, I Love Stationery.  I Love Handmade Books is a charming gift book. And, in case you were wondering – the book itself has a stitched binding, a dust-jacket,  and beautiful bookcase-print endpapers.

The Art of Cutting, by Jean-Charles Trebbi. Book review.

The Art of Cutting

Tradition and new techniques for paper, cardboard,

wood, and other materials

Jean-Charles Trebbi

Promopress, 15 January 2015, paperback

Link to Amazon (click)

Star rating: ****

Jean-Charles Trebbi is back with another inspirational design odyssey. The subject this time is – literally –  cutting-edge design. The book examines the many transformative techniques used to cut creative materials. The emphasis is on paper, but the book is interdisciplinary and looks at methods of cutting a range of materials including fabric, wood, metal, and plastic.

The author, an architect and designer, has retained a childlike sense of wonder about how things are crafted and assembled. He begins with a whirlwind world tour of cutting techniques. In the Cutting as Popular Art section, national traditions of cutting crafts including the following papercutting methods feature:  French canivet (paper lace, similar to Pergamano), janzhi (China), kirie (Japan), Scherensnitt  (Switzerland), wycinanki (Poland), and papel picado (Mexico). These folk arts are described, and you also see work by innovative practitioners such as Kathleen Trenchard, who creates updated papel picado featuring contemporary subject matter. 

The Cutting and Gastronomy section is a revelation. I was unfamiliar with Icelandic Laufabrauo (leaf bread), Christmas bread which is decorated with ornate lacé patterns. The Orange Art pages are a fun curiosity- a party trick with design credentials. Kind of like small-scale pumpkin-carving, this obscure craft involves cutting orange peel in intricate interlocking designs.

Most of the book has a Meet the Makers format, and is divided into sections according to material. The author looks in on designers who are driven by tradition, enabled by technology, and fuelled by creative ingenuity. They generously reveal their methods, observations, and motivations. Example: Sophie Milenovich, of Paris, notes that, “The most surprising thing when you study the different ways of making clothing is the inventiveness you find in communities that produce a three-dimensional object from a two-dimensional element.” She goes on to point out that Western clothes tend to be constructed of complex pattern pieces. The section on clothing shows an appreciation of the aesthetic appeal of the pattern pieces themselves, which are displayed as works of art in their own right. Sort of like the double-helix – if a design works, it is beautiful.

So – the book is an all-singing, all-dancing exploration of cutting-based form and function - the tools and techniques used to cut a variety of materials, plus examples of artisan-designed end products. 

If you are a papercraft geek, you may already know what slice-forms are.  Described by the author as “halfway between art and mathematics”, they are geometric shapes made of comblike pieces that interlock at right angles. Astonishingly, they fold flat. The Art of Cutting is very informative on slice-forms. I was fascinated to read that slice-forms were used by the famous Bauhaus School to teach 3-D design to its students in the 1920s (in the absence of computer imaging). Now slice-forms are designed on computer. And because of digital cutting technology, slice-form designs can be created as  functional items, such as furniture. 

This book contains 10 templates to cut out. My .pdf preview did not include these, but if they are similar in quality to the templates in The Art of Pop-Up, they won’t disappoint.

Taken with his other Promopress titles, The Art of Pop-Up, and The Art of Folding,(I’ve yet to feature the latter – I’m catching up – but I wanted you to know about The Art of Cutting, the newest title, right away), it looks like M. Trebbi is working towards a design theory of everything. I, for one, am hoping that the author will tackle 3D and 4D printing next. That would be a treat.