There are more tunnels and round things where this came from: see  y o u h a v e b e e n h e r e s o m e t i m e. This photo originally via OWI.

Everyone always leaves.

The Unhappy Hipsters blog features Dwell Magazine photos with the captions they were crying out for. Because it’s lonely in the modern world.

Even in your company I feel so alone.

Dwell has a sense of humour; this is their Twitter reply.

This is a follow-up to an earlier post on the way digital technology and textile printing is fueling a wave of experimentation in textile design. I just heard from Melanie Bowles, a lecturer at the Chelsea School of Art in London, who produces a very interesting blog called makeitdigitaltextiles. She has recently co-authored a book on this topic as well, Digital Textile Design. The Make It Digital blog is a very useful resource for designers or anyone interested in textile or other digital design. The beautiful book shown above is not Bowles’ book, but a digital design resource book called Kapitza which I discovered on Bowles’ blog. “Each geometric pattern is built from ‘font shapes.’ The book comes with a CD of downloadable fonts so you can create endless pattern yourself.” Extremely useful! The blog also has an interesting post on Alexander McQueen, but most of the designers Bowles mentions were new to me. For example Glory Scarves out of Australia, see below, who use algorithmic design to automate the production of one-of-a-kind prints:

Fabulous digitally printed scarves from Australia show the changing look of printed textiles using a digital medium. Each scarf is created by entering an individual equation into a computer – creating a mathematically valid fractal – each scarf is therefore unique.

Finally, Bowles likes geometric and experimental patterns, and her blog is free from the more kitchen-y, crafty, neo-granny textile patterns that are proliferating in North America via the new digital printing services. It’s great that digital printing democratizes textile design and makes it affordable, but for me many of the results are disappointing, on this continent anyway. Bowles’ blog is not like that. Below is one of her own textile designs, a conflation of traditional Japanese shibori – which has always had a geometric component – and more mathematical design methods. Very well thought out and beautifully executed.

My recent work ‘Digital Shibori’ explores the parallels between traditional craft processes and digital technology and I have been looking at the ancient craft of Shibori which uses the techniques of stitching, knotting and folding fabric which is then dyed to achieve the organic patterning that it creates. I have translated these effects in Adobe Illustrator by manipulating graphic geometrics and experimenting with light effects, blends and folded pattern to create the essence of this traditional craft… the designs have been finally digitally printed onto organza and cottons to maintain the feeling of light.

From Unnecessary Quotes.

The blog YOU HAVE BEEN HERE SOMETIME does, as its title suggests, provoke an uncanny feeling. If not a feeling of deja vu, then at least a sense of the mysterious life of objects. No snapshots of the blog that I can include here will reproduce the feeling you get from the way David John, its creator, exhibits photographs and information; you just have to go there for yourself. YHBHS’s atmospheric collection of dopplegangers and doubles and triples is part of the effect. How does he find these art and design objects that echo each other in this way? The simplicity is deceptive, and the geometry is mesmerizing. I also appreciate the way he combines design with art – mostly midcentury, 60s and later sculpture. And with lamps, because on his blog everything is illuminated. And the white space, which the internet virtually never allows you. Sometimes when I can’t stabilize my mood, I just go to you have been here sometime and I feel better. David has remarked on the importance of art in a community, and he’s right. YHBHS is from L.A.

2thewalls is the closest thing on the internet to the much-missed and now cult-status Nest: Quarterly of Interiors. Finding 2thewalls is a bit like falling down the rabbit hole, and not just because reading it feels like deciphering text printed on a zebra crossing. Like Nest, 2thewalls is concerned with the way people actually live in architecture, and, also similar to Nest, 2thewalls somehow illuminates reality’s tendency to take on an almost Alice in Wonderland quality. In design, reality really is stranger than fiction, and both publications get this across not just through unconventional subject matter and design, but also by providing interesting historical context in such a way that it overturns our more banal assumptions about where objects and styles come from. I find it a welcome refuge from the massive decontextualization of styles and objects that most decor magazines and blogs (tumblr! I’m talking to you!) are guilty of, something that I think flattens our experience of the design around us and converts it into an exhausting avalanche of commodities. 2thewalls always makes me think, and it has the additional knack of somehow digging up things that I’ve once loved but have then lost or forgotten. A long time ago I cut out these two photos (above and below) from a vintage garage-sale copy of Architectural Digest: a blue fold-out writing desk in the shape of a hippo, and an old wooden staircase out of a folk tale, but I lost them and never saw them again until they resurfaced on 2thewalls. I’m showing this work only because it’s a favourite of mine, but there is so much more there to look at on 2thewalls. All of the work shown here  is by Atelier Lalanne, and you really should go to 2thewalls to read the original accompanying text. Photos here, all except for the last two, are courtesy of 2thewalls and were taken from the February 1981 issue of AD, and are by Marc Lacroix. 2thewalls is a project of New York designer Keehnan Konyha.

The table by Francois-Xavier Lalanne, above, is easily disassembled into 5 round bistro tables. Below, Francois-Xavier (inset) and Claude Lalanne. The two pieces at bottom – a frog that opens into a chair and a necklace that seems to have been made in ancient Greece – both sold recently at auction. A comprehensive book on Atelier Lalanne work is Claude & Francois-Xavier Lalanne and see also Claude & Francois-Xavier Lalanne: Fragments.