Print: Fashion, Interiors, Art

Across all three – fashion, interiors and art – there are some great graphics-led examples and the book takes us through them looking at the latest styles, techniques and technologies in print and pattern making.

Overall it gives the impression of the incredible fluidity that analogue and digital technologies are affording designers in textile and non-textile media.

At the heart of the book is the idea that analogue and digital techniques can be used to make prints and patterns on all manner of surfaces, on clothes, as wall coverings and for art’s sake.

The book recognises that basic printing techniques co-exist with digital ones, and that digital printing has freed pattern from the conventional parameters of screen and rotary printing.

There’s a lot of reinterpreting older patterns, often in a witty or subversive way, and in the fashion world engineered print designs reveal all kinds of asymmetrical possibilities. Meanwhile in the interiors world the trends for impactful single images are explored.

The book has been written by Dr Simon Clarke, a practicing textile designer and artist specialising in digital.

Clarke talks about the “visual rhythms” and juxtapositions in pattern systems and says that they are in a state of deconstruction and reconstruction “with few aesthetic limits”.

If you want to get into the detail Clarke has gone to the trouble of showing how and why print and pattern techniques have diversified, but his aim was to set out to show the most imaginative contemporary examples of print, and he’s done this.

So the book is just as useful as a look book of inspiration with hundreds of case studies, which can be viewed in isolation on their own merit.

It has been designed by Shaz Madani and features a textured jacket illustration by Francesco Simeti.

Print: Fashion, Interiors, Art is published by Laurence King and priced £30.00