courtesy : Design and Textiles
Textile design disciplines
Printed Textile Design
Printed textile design: William Morris, Strawberry Thief, 1883.
Printed textile designs are produced by the application of various printing processes to fabric or cloth and other media, Printed textile design, woven textile design, and mixed media textile design are the three major disciplines of textile design, each of which uses distinct ways to create a surface embellished fabric for a variety of uses and markets, namely: resist printing, relief printing, rotogravure, screen printing, transfer printing, and digital printing. These processes use various inks and dyes to imprint aesthetic, often repeating patterns, motifs, and styles onto the fabric or cloth. Printed textile designers are predominantly and inextricably involved with home interior design (designing patterns for carpets, wallpapers, or even ceramics), the fashion and clothing industries, and the paper industry (designing stationary or gift wrap).
There are numerous established and enduring printed styles and designs that can be broken down into four major categories: floral, geometric, world cultures, and conversational. Floral designs include flowers, plants, or any botanical theme. Geometric designs feature themes both inorganic and abstract such as tessellations. Designs surrounding world cultures may be traced to a specific geographic, ethnic, or anthropological source. Finally, conversational designs are designs that fit less easily into the other categories: they may be described as presenting “imagery that references popular icons of a particular time period or season, or which is unique and challenges our perceptions in some way.” Each category contains sundry, more specific individual styles and designs.
Different clothes, moreover, require different dyes: for example, silk, wool, or other protein-based fabrics require acidic dyes based whereas synthetic fabrics require specialized disperse dyes.
The advent of computer-aided design software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, has allowed each discipline of textile design to evolve and innovate new practices and processes, but has most influenced the production of printed textile designs. Most prominently, digital tools have made the process of creating repeating patterns or motifs, or repeats, much more effective and simple. Repeats are used to create patterns both visible and invisible to the eye: geometric patterns are intended to depict clear, intentional patterns, whereas floral or organic designs, for instance, are intended to create unbroken repeats that are ideally undetectable. Digital tools have also aided in making better patterns by easing up an issue called “tracking”, where the eye is inadvertently drawn to parts of textiles that expose the discontinuity of the textile and reveal its pattern. These tools, alongside the innovation of digital inkjet printing, have allowed the textile printing process to become faster, more scalable, and sustainable.
Woven Textile Design
Woven textile design originates from the practice of weaving which produces fabric by interlacing a vertical yarn (warp) and a horizontal yarn (weft), most often at right angles. Woven textile designs are created by various types of looms and are now predominantly produced using a mechanized or computerized jacquard loom.
Woven textile design: A woven Navajo saddle blanket from the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Designs within the context of weaving are created using various types of yarns, using variance in texture, size, and color to construct a stylized patterned or monochromatic fabric. There are a large range of yarn types available to the designer, including but not limited to: cotton, twill, linen, and synthetic fibers. In order to produce the woven fabric, the designer first delineates and visualizes the sequence of threading which is traditionally drawn out on graph paper known as a point paper.
The designer also will choose a weave structure which governs the aesthetic design that will be produced. The most common process is a plain weave, in which the yarns interlace in an alternating, tight formation producing a strong and flexible multi-use fabric. Twill weaves, which are also common, alternatively use diagonal lines created by floating the warp or the weft to the left or the right. This process creates a softer fabric favored by designers in the fashion and clothing design industries. Common and recognizable twill styles include patterns like houndstooth or herringbone.
Beyond weave structure, color is another dominant aspect governing woven textile design. Typically, designers choose two or more contrasting colors that will be woven into patterns based on the designer’s chosen threading sequence. Color is also dependent on the size of the yarn: fine yarns will produce a fabric that may change colors when it receives light from different angles whereas larger yarns will generally produce a more monochromatic surface.
