Each time I update fabric listings on this site, I find myself lingering over particular images and thinking about the design strategies behind them.

Fading and blending with restricted color

The three fabrics above, all quilting-weight cotton from the Northcott “Visual Arts” series, appear to be printed in the normal commercial way (i.e. using rotary screens, a small palette of colors, and, maybe, halftones for the areas where one color fades to another). These color-blending areas – light yellow to dark in the top two images, light green to dark in the bottom one – give the cloth a vaguely antique or hand-colored look. I love these subtle blends, however mechanically and artificially achieved. But getting the fading colors to read as fresh and contemporary (rather than simply as nostalgic and fake) has called for some clever design decisions.

Each of the yellow-background fabrics is overprinted (in appearance, if not in reality) with a highly complex but single-color (black) pattern. This pattern catches and holds the eye, diverting attention from the mechanical means by which the background effect is achieved. And the crisp, unfaded black lines announce up front that this is a piece of contemporary fabric, not imitation vintage. In the green fabric, a grayish pattern, derived, maybe, from a high-contrast photo of a woven texture, is printed over a solid yellow-green ground. This pattern looks modern/postmodern (frankly photo-derived) and it also draws attention away from the mechanics of the green fades going on inside the round medallions.

No fades, no overlaps, no oblique angles

The next three prints , which by coincidence (or maybe not) all happen to be animal prints, use simple shapes, no blending and little detail inside the shapes, and no overlapping at all. In the middle fabric – the only one where some of the shapes are hollow – a few of these hollow shapes do touch each other or the big black target-like form. But none of these collisions lead to deformation. Nothing gets squashed; nothing overlaps. It’s as if all the animals, plants, and rocks (or whatever) are on parade and all taking care to stay a proper distance apart and turn their best sides toward us.

The charm of each design is that they do this so well, filling up the blank white space so fully and evenly. That and the inherent appeal of animals, however symbolized and simplified for easy recognition. There’s also the feat of fitting all these shapes together while keeping all the animals in heads-up position (or, in the case of the first fabric, at right angles to each other). The designers have done a lot with simple means.