I've been asked to contribute surface pattern designs to an online catalogue that manufacturers use. So I've submitted quite a few patterns to them over the last week, some of which have been dormant on my hard drive for months. Just thought it might be instructive (for me, at least) to post what's been rejected and what's been accepted. We'll start with the rejects. I like rejects.
I only know why two of these were rejected and that is due to very bad pixel quality. In terms of the others I have no idea. What's strange is that all of these took a lot of effort, so much messing about on Photoshop with layers and special effects, perhaps that's the problem, I might have been approaching them with too much of an artistic sensibility rather than thinking about what would actually work on products like shirts and pens. I have quite a crazy pattern orientated dress sense but I don't think even I would most of these... perhaps they are a bit too 70s.
Which brings us onto the triumphant accepted patterns... and all the criticisms I made in the previous paragraph are still applicable. These are all still quite 70s. In all honesty I'm completely clueless as to why some are accepted and some aren't, but what I have learnt is that the patterns that take me 20 minutes to make usually get accepted but the ones I spend ages on always get rejected.... so there's a lesson in there somewhere. If you are designing patterns for mass production then surely it's much better to make them quickly. I'm very fortunate to have so much source material for creative patterns, by cutting out a small square of a picture and then duplicating that square it into a repeat pattern I can make hundreds of surface pattern designs. Even though it's very uninteresting there a very real a sense of achievement in how easy I find it as I know that a lot of people would find it difficult. I still I don't feel I've reached the apex of my pattern designing skills, but I suppose that will come with time and practice and hours of switching off my brain.
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Here are the patterns I've submitted today. I've no idea which ones will be rejected or accepted but some of them are actually derived from the rejected patterns, so even if a pattern gets rejected it can be reworked into a new pattern.
I think I've written enough about patterns for one day... in all honesty I'm not sure how much I can talk about surface pattern design. It's just not very interesting. Maybe I'll start finding it more interesting to talk about if I start making money out of it.
That would be nice.
