24 pattern

“Pattern, the fruit of design, can be seen as the measure of culture.”

WILLIAM FEAVER (BRITISH, B. 1942) Art Critic, Author

pat·tern \'pa-tərn\ n

3: an artistic, musical, literary, or mechanical design or form

Like texture, pattern is a fundamental design principle that helps define the visual quality of surface activity. The visual characteristics of any pattern help us see distinctions between one object and another. Pattern is a specific type of visual texture and is traditionally derived from a defined and repeated compositional structure always appearing in an organized and regimented graphic manner.

Soft, muted tones of color, pattern, and typography are used as figurative textures to further enhance the identity program for Odun, a Mexico City restaurant featuring Asian cuisines. The overall identity, as well as its array of tones, colors, and patterns, was inspired by a diversity of influences, flavors, scents, and spirits found throughout Asian cultures.

BLOK DESIGN

Mexico City, MX

The elements of point, line, and shape have been the basis for creating pattern throughout history. In combining pattern with the organizational design principle of the grid, you can create an infinite variety of end results. By utilizing a singular element in different organizations, configurations, and compositions, patterns can be realized with endless variations, subtle or obvious, all built around a common graphic denominator.

This visual identity system for the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research comprises two type-based elements that are consistently framed on a left-hand edge with abstract line patterns reminiscent of African visual cultures.

BRUCE MAU DESIGN

Toronto, ONT, CA

1911

Hermann Scherrer Poster

LUDWIG HOHLWEIN

Munich, DE

Ludwig Hohlwein and the Hermann Scherrer style

LUDWIG HOHLWEIN (1847–1949) was trained and practiced as an architect until 1906, when he became interested in graphic design and the visual arts.

During the 1890s, he lived in Munich, where he was part of the United Workshops for Arts and Crafts, an avant-garde group of artists and craftsmen dedicated to the tenets and principles of the Arts and Crafts movement. Hohlwein moved to Berlin in 1911 and started working as a graphic designer primarily designing advertisements and posters for the men’s clothing company Hermann Scherrer.

Hohlwein’s most creative phase of work and a large variety of his best-known posters were created between 1912 and 1925. It was during this critical period that he developed his own unique visual style. By 1925, he had already designed 3,000 different advertisements and became the best-known German commercial artist of his time.

Poster historian Alain Weill (French, b. 1946) comments that “Hohlwein was the most prolific and brilliant German posterist of the twentieth century . . . Beginning with his first efforts, Hohlwein found his style with disconcerting facility. It would vary little for the next forty years. The drawing was perfect from the start, nothing seemed alien to him, and in any case, nothing posed a problem for him. His figures are full of touches of color and a play of light and shade that brings them out of their background and gives them substance.”

Hohlwein’s work relied mostly on strong figurative elements with reductive qualities of high contrast, intense flat color, and bold patterns of geometric elements. This is evident in his iconographic poster for Hermann Scherrer. The figurative element of the man is optically centered in the poster with no apparent horizon line. The well-dressed gentleman and his riding accessories, as well as his pure-bred dog, are all represented in a reductive, stark manner combined with vivid color and an abstract, black-and-white checkerboard pattern. Here, Hohlwein treats this distinctive pattern as a two-dimensional plane. It is in extreme contrast to the surrounding three-dimensional compositional elements, creating a strong and memorable focal point for the poster.

His adaptation of photographic images was based on an intuitive understanding of visual design principles. His creative use of color and architectural compositions dispels any suggestion that he used photographs as the basis of his creative output. Additionally, his use of high tonal contrasts, interlocking shapes, and distinctive patterns made his work instantly recognizable and memorable.

Along with Lucian Bernhard (German, 1883–1972), Ludwig Hohlwein was one of the most successful and celebrated designers of the Plakatstil and Sachplakat modes or “poster” and “object poster” styles in Germany during this time period.

The genesis of the rebranding program for the Jewish Museum in New York City is based on “sacred geometry,” an ancient geometric system from which the Star of David was conceived, with program elements drawn from this grid-like pattern. These elements include a custom wordmark, iconography, typography, illustrations, and supporting graphic patterns used across all print and digital media.

SAGMESITER & WALSH

New York, NY, USA

The branding program for Nizuc, an upscale resort and residential community in Mexico, was inspired by the site’s Mayan history. The project’s figurative symbol, also evocative of Mayan carvings and bas-reliefs, is the base element of graphic patterns used throughout this visual program.

CARBONE SMOLAN AGENCY

New York, NY, USA

Artists and graphic designers have also developed a wide range of styles, forms, and motifs. For example, early twentieth-century innovators of pattern making include William Morris (British, 1834–1896), Koloman Moser (Austrian, 1868–1918), Anni Albers (German, 1899–1994), Mariano Fortuny (Spanish, 1871–1949), Alvin Lustig (American, 1915–1955), Ray Eames (American, 1912–1988), and Alexander Girard (American, 1907–1993) up to contemporary designers such as Richard Rhys (British).

In the early 1900s, with the advent of the modernist movement in the visual and applied arts, a preference for minimalist surfaces and textures was the norm; ornate patterning and overtly decorative surfaces were avoided. This trend has been tempered, and a far wider palette of choices is now evident and appreciated worldwide.

TCHO is a San Francisco–based luxury chocolate manufacturer that uses a broad palette of pattern as functional and interpretive elements in its branding program. Its graphic influences are derived from Aztec culture, where chocolate was used as a form of currency. Contemporary line variations on currency patterns, representing the six flavor-driven product lines—chocolaty, nutty, fruity, floral, and citrus—are used as decorative product identifiers. Each pattern is framed within a square and is the base element connecting all packaging, collateral, and visual communication material. The brand’s color palette extends from dark brown to bright magenta, orange, and yellow, reflecting the flavors as well as the high-tech modernist values of the product line.

EDENSPIEKERMANN

Berlin, DE

Pattern has a strong relationship to geometry, since it is an organized and regimented texture in which singular elements are composed on a defined and repeated structure. Due to this underlying structure, that patterns are always synthetic, man-made, and mechanical, and never organic.

This assignment requires students to analyze the potential of pattern in relationship to color and composition. Using abstract shapes and fundamental graphic elements, students initially develop a 10 X 10-inch (25.4 X 25.4 cm) square complex pattern based on an assigned piece of music. This pattern is then modified into seven color variations—black and white, monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split complementary, triadic, and tetradic.

ALETA CORBOY, Student

ANNABELLE GOULD, Instructor

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Seattle, WA, USA

Brown, Juana Francisca’s Kitchen, is a confectionery offering a delicate selection of gourmet sweets. Its packaging system uses kraft board boxes, a series of preprinted tag cards, and rubber stamps with decorative motifs and patterns that carry information about what’s inside the box. The repetitive dot and line motifs and patterns are evocative of decorative icing used on confections and baked goods.

LIP

Bogotá, CO

The most basic patterns are composed through repetition and are considered a repeat of any visual element such as point, line, shape, form, or color. A single element is combined with duplicates of itself without change or modification. For example, a checkerboard is a simple pattern based on alternating squares of black and red.

Patterns can also be based on familiar elements, such as in simple decorative patterns of stripes, zigzags, and polka dots. Other patterns are more visually complex and are found in nature, art, and the built environment. These include arabesques, branching, circulation, fractals, helixes, lattices, meanders, nests, polyhedra, spheres, spirals, symmetry, volutes, and waves. A recurring pattern in fine art and architecture is referred to as a motif.

This entrance to Brooklyn Botanic Garden comprises two 12-foot (4 m) high curved walls rising on both sides of the entrance and sheathed in stainless steel with an etched cherry tree leaf pattern. The actual entrance gates are the same material; however, the leaf pattern here is water-jet cut, creating a stainless steel grille for viewing into the garden when it is closed.

POULIN + MORRIS INC.

New York, NY, USA

Decorative patterns are layered in vellum; the outer layer represented graphically in stark black and white, the other revealing the same pattern in a rich, vibrant, multicolored palette. This layering device is a metaphor for the dual undertone themes of these classic Jane Austen (British, 1775–1817) novels—Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Emma (1815).

ISABELLE RANCIER, Student

TRACY BOYCHUK, Instructor

SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS

New York, NY, USA

Kinetic and energetic line patterns are used for a series of notebook covers developed, designed, and marketed by this California–based design firm. The juxtaposition of two patterns for each notebook, and the use of a broad range of intense, vibrant color palettes throughout, add a visual power and vibrancy to each of these cover combinations.

ADAMSMORIOKA INC.

Beverly Hills, CA, USA

Moirés are also a form of pattern first used after World War II, when graphic designers began to exploit and experiment with the conventional methods and attributes of process reproduction and offset printing. Moiré patterns revealed to the viewer the layered tints and enlarged halftones of these processes, creating dynamic and unexpected visual effects of color and texture that had not been visually experienced before this time period.

Today, digital software is an easily accessible and immediate means by which the same visual pattern effects can be achieved.

Both labels for “Il conte” use a common base pattern comprising geometric form triangles and vine leaf elements that function as a frame and iconic backdrop for each wine name—Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and Pinot Grigio. This pattern is further enhanced and articulated with color, red or warm white, depending upon which wine type is identified.

LOUISE FILI LTD.

New York, NY, USA