Speaking from Experience: Tea Towel Designs.

Designing my layouts to print tea towels of my food designs (unfortunately, time permitting). Something that I have wanted to do for a long time, digital printing these designs onto fabric tea towels would provide not only myself the oppurtunity to experiment with different printing methods, but also the application of design onto fabric- surface pattern design, which I have always been a great fan of. 

In terms of the brief and my project, I feel that printing onto tea towels would be a fun and unique way to educate, whilst also being practical. After discussing it at the progress crit last Friday, it received some really positive feedback from other group members- it was just the combination with the paper craft designs that would be the problem. Hopefully, my application of vector designs would resolve this problem.

Unfortunately, I have since lost the screen shots, but when first combining all of my designs together, the tea towel looked a little too messy and too colourful. In all of the designs I researched, the hand one thing in common- minimal colour and some sort of griding structure, so I took it from there...

I created a simple griding structure on InDesign using the 480mmx780mm tea towel dimensions. I had an equal eight-column vertical grid, as well as a few horizontal at the bottom for aligning my text.

I chose to use the repeated pattern of the vector design in a griding format of 6x8 to create a bold, almost Pop Art like effect, in which food was a common feature- which I think works well with the condensed text at the bottom, with the logo design in a spot colour from the vector, the tag line "high energy food for a low-energy lifestyle" and the information about each specific foodstuff in the bottom right-hand corner.

The finished outcome- reminds me of a poster or postcard design, so hopefully it would work well across various applications. Also the designs should work quite well as a set- each having the same distinctive griding structure and format. 

Again, as previously mentioned on my blog, there have been difficulties in retrieving a print slot- coming to the end of the term, the room has been booked out for the entire week by textiles and surface pattern design courses. Therefore, the earliest I will be able to print is next Monday. Unfortunately, therefore, I won't be able to get these printed in time for the final crit, but they should be complete by the module hand-in (touch wood!).

Also, the fabric won't be ideal- a cotton upholstery which wouldn't usually be used as a tea towel fabric (the weave a little too heavy) but unfortunately now I will just have to make compromises and hope that I can achieve as desirable a result as possible.