Create a Home Decor Upholstery Pattern

1. About the Class: [MUSIC] Hey, I'm Laura Adams. Imagine shopping at your favorite furniture store and seeing your design on the beautiful fabric a family is considering purchasing. What if you walked into your neighbor's home only to find a fabric you designed on their living room chairs. Can't you just see your fabric on decorative pillows, bedding, drapery, and more? I've been a surface pattern and textile designer for the last 28 years and I've seen this scenario happen in my own life again and again. It's so exciting. I've created original artwork, purchased artwork, and developed it into product, created home decor lines, led teams of designers and worked intimately with customers to discover what they need most. My career has essentially been split between two major markets, residential and commercial textiles. Our focus in this class will be on residential textiles and how you can create a pattern that would be appropriate for home decor upholstery. I'll explain the ins and outs of the process, how trends are involved, what your role is as a designer and give you examples of the types of things that this market needs. This class is for surface pattern designers or aspiring textile designers who would like to understand the home decor upholstery market better, as well as the possibilities of getting their designs into the market. I truly believe there's a need for fresh points of view in this market, and many designers already have the basic skill sets they need to enter it. However, there are insider tips that they need to understand, like how to prep and size files, how to color patterns, what language to use, and more. After this class, you'll have a basic understanding of how to discover trend that speaks to your style, build a home decor pattern, and the basic manufacturing restrictions you need to follow. We'll focus on digital designs versus hand-painted designs. I recommend Photoshop,, Illustrator, Procreate, EAT or NedGraphics. Our class handout will provide the proper file setups, repeats, and manufacturing parameters to keep in mind. Are you ready to get started? It's going to be fun. Come join me. I'll walk you through it. I'll see you soon. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project Overview: [MUSIC] Our class project, we'll be creating a surface pattern design that's well suited for the current home decor market. You'll have a class handout to reference. It gives examples of styles used in the market with some language around those, manufacturing requirements for artwork, and places to research trends. Once you have your idea in mind, you'll create a feature pattern using the guidelines given in the handout and discussed in class, so that the end result makes manufacturing requirements is sized correctly, uses the correct number of colors, is formatted for the industry, and repeats properly for this market. I invite you to share your work in the project gallery. I would love to give you some feedback and encouragement as you start your journey into a marketplace you're going to love. I'll see you in the next video where we'll get started. [MUSIC] 3. Market Overview: [MUSIC] Before we start, I thought you might find it helpful to understand that there are actually two markets for this type of product. The first is the one we all know, because we all use it in our own homes. That's the residential market. It's our couches, soft chairs, drapery, rugs, essentially anything we use to create a space in our homes. The second market is one you may be less familiar with, but I'd like for you to be aware of. Thus the commercial market, often referred to as the contract and hospitality market in the industry. It's hotels, restaurants, office spaces, public spaces, health care and more. Essentially, anywhere outside of your home that uses fabric falls into this category. For this class, we'll focus on the residential upholstery market or home decor upholstery market. But, it's always good to understand the full breadth of opportunity. The residential upholstery market is a $188 billion industry in the US alone. It runs yearly cycles that work like this. Twice a year, fabric company showcase their new products in High Point, North Carolina. Furniture manufacturers meet there, and go from showroom to showroom looking for the next exciting fabric to put on their products. Orders are placed, deals are made and samples are requested. This twice a year event is held in May and November and is called Showtime. Five months after each Showtime in October and April, another event is held again in High Point, North Carolina called Furniture Market. During this event, the items that were purchased during Showtime by the furniture manufacturers have been put onto their newest furniture collections, and are then shown to retailers to purchase and place in retail stores for buyers like you and me to choose from. Five months is actually a really short turnaround time for fabric to make it from being shown at Showtime to being on Furniture or the following Furniture Market. But, that's what keeps us in history fresh fashion forward and an exciting thing to be a part of. When fabric manufacturers show their fabrics at showtime, they are prepped and ready for orders, hoping that furniture manufacturers will chase several of their fabrics as fabric placements or the new and upcoming furniture lines that will be sold to retailers. There are literally thousands of fabric shown during Showtime. That means thousands of ideas, concepts, and pieces of artwork that have to be translated into fabrics. It happens again and again twice a year in an industry that continues, because of people's love of decorating their homes. From upholstered couches and chairs to accent pillows, throws, accent pieces and more. This industry [MUSIC] is thriving and waiting on the next exciting idea. Could that be yours? Let's get you started. [MUSIC] 4. Basic Trend Research: [MUSIC] As you can tell from the way the market moves, ideas are constantly evolving. Furniture and fabric manufacturers are always looking for the next exciting thing to lead the market. Everyone wants to be on the forefront of style, design, and the next trend. This takes research and knowledge on the furniture and manufacturing side to keep abreast of what's up and coming, and that takes a constant eye on trends. Now, a little side note here. Beyond trends, there's designs that are known as classics that are almost always acceptable. Those are the most basic designs, like herringbones, plaids, twills, plains. But even those evolve and are affected by trends. In a market that sells to the mass consumer, being aware of trends and what the customer wants is the key to your success. But it's not some impossible thing to attain. All it takes is a keen eye and a discerning point of view. If you refer to our class handout, you'll see several places I've listed for trend research just in case you're interested in researching on your own. For our purposes here, I'm going to walk you through an example of how I would use one resource to look at the trends and then choose an idea that I can interpret into my own style. You can either use the same inspiration as mine or choose something on your own for our class project. Now we're going to go online and I'm going to show you how I would research a trend and then translate it into my own personal style. This segment will be about researching the trend, and then next we will develop the pattern so you can see how those work together. I've gone onto Google and I've typed in 2022 Residential Upholstery Trends. There's other search terms that you can put in, but this is just the one that came to mind. As you can see, there's tons of things that come up. The Spruce, Household Beautiful, New Decor Trends, Apartment Therapy, Decorilla, there's just a ton. I have other places that I've listed in your handout that are also good places to look for trends and ones that I use regularly. But for our purposes here, I thought we would just Google something and then just choose one. We are going to choose Apartment Therapy, nine of the biggest living room trends to look out for in 2022. We click on that. You can read the full article, or you can just flip through and get the major points. They're saying here that curvy, organic-shaped furniture is going to be important. That's coming from the pandemic and the need for people to feel comforted and almost like a hug. You're starting to see rounded furniture, any furniture that has really just plush fabrics that are very comfortable. Multifunctional, airy spaces, warm tones and accents, lived in finishes. You can see here in this furniture with the beautiful gray hound on it that everything is curved. It's a boho style, everything is eclectic and comfortable and familiar. Bringing the outdoor in is another very important trend right now. You'll see outdoor fabric that can be used indoors, and then indoor fabrics that can be used outdoors. Then inside, you'll also see, on the patterns, nature elements, things that tie to nature, indoors. Then outdoors on those fabrics, they will feel more like indoor fabrics. They may be plush, they may have more decorative elements, or maybe even colors that were typically used indoor versus outdoor. Its basically people trying to open up their spaces and make their homes bigger by utilizing their outdoor space as well. Vintage furniture, I love this trend. It's also, you'll see, maybe they'll speak to it here later, but you see a lot of wallpapers, very decorative wallpapers and deep comforting colors. I think this also is a result of the pandemic and people looking into their history, getting to know their families better through different ways of communicating with them. They probably told each other a lot more stories, maybe asked deeper questions than they would have in the past. There's a real connection to our personal family histories right now, which is speaking to this trend with vintage furniture. Modern retro, reupholstery, upholstered chairs. I guess they're saying accent chairs here. You see the little purple ones, it brings an interest into that room. That's just one example of a place that is speaking to trends. When I do trend research, I actually try to pull from multiple places. Then I'll try to find commonalities between those places and then use those common trends to maybe find one trend that I want to design to. Now, because I do trend research regularly, I know that, let me get back up here, that the retro, the vintage furniture and just retro, not even retro, more like historical, like family history, I know that that's a big trend right now, and I also know that bringing the outdoors inside is a big trend right now. Having patterns that have natural elements in them, both of those are important. Those are the two things that I'm going to think about when I'm designing my pattern. Now one last thing to note. In an industry where trends matter, there's no room for ego. While you may have a strong sense of style and uniqueness in your work, and that's a beautiful thing, you have to be open to the fact that what you like may not be what sells. You have to be able to look at trends, find something that sparks your interest, and then bring it down to a sellable design. If you love unicorns and rainbows, for example, but that isn't trending in residential upholstery and buyers are therefore not interested in it, they won't be interested in your artwork no matter how amazing or creative it is. You have to work within the wants and needs of the industry, and remember that it's about serving your in-customer. Through the years, I've found that I'm actually the most creative when given restraints to design within, like a trend. In these cases, you push yourself to show your design point of view through the product, giving them something unique and different within the trend. The rest is just ego. To thrive in this market, you have to let that go. [MUSIC] 5. Design a Feature Pattern: [MUSIC] This is where the fun begins. You understand the market a little better. We've done our research and we have a starting point for our design. Now let's work out our pattern. Home décor collections from fabric manufacturers are often quite large but typically they're created in sets of three patterns; the feature, the coordinate, and the plane. We're starting with the feature because it's the one piece that speaks the most to the trend and the other two are typically built from. I'll talk through some possibilities for these as we build the feature so that you understand how they come together. When designing for the feature for the home décor market, we need to start with the end in mind. There are industry standards that exist that got fabric manufacturers to create fabrics that will best work for the furniture manufacturers. Feature patterns can go anywhere from an accent pillow, to a side chair, to a full size couch. Since we want the pattern to be flexible in it's use we have to consider that it might go anywhere. Now, let's look at our handout. The typical cushion measurements for chairs, love seats, and sofas are the following. It's an extensive list. On top of that, we know that the backside of chairs and other furniture is at least 14 inches high. This means that anything we do needs to fit into all of these parameters. Now, without going into a ton of details, I'll just point out that the industry standard repeat sizes used to accommodate all of these needs are nine inch repeats, 13.5 repeats, and 27 inch repeats. The most common and the one we'll use today is the 13.5 inch repeat. Let's also assume that the final pattern will be a print. While many of today's prints are digital, let's assume that it could be a rotary print and limit the colors to no more than 12. I actually tend to use no more than eight but that's just me. We're also going to take a closer look at repeat issues than we might for other products because there's a chance that our repeat could end up on a large item like a 62 inch sofa, we have to be more aware of repeat lines, holes, etc, than if we were making fabric for quilting squares or wrapping paper for example. Now we're going to start working on our feature pattern. Just as a reminder, the two trends that spoke to me were bringing the outdoors in and what I'm going to call family history. I found these motifs that I have not used before so I thought they might work well here so I've dropped them in. I'm using Procreate and I just wanted to show you how I set the file up. This is a 13.5 inch by 13.5 inch repeat and since it's a print, we're going to do it at 300 dots per inch and if you do the math there it works out to 40, 50 picks in both directions. I'm just going to start dropping these motifs, placing them around. I'm doing this on the fly so I hope you guys will show me some grace here. [MUSIC] Just trying to eyeball it. I like how this is creating sort diamond effect. I'm going to take some of my other motifs and drop them in, try to scale them more closely to what I've scaled the least. Now, normally I would probably create multiple little motifs here but for the sake of time I'm just taking these two and moving them around. If I were to do the same motif I would try to rotate them or flip them or do something to make them a little bit different. But typically I would probably just create additional ones. It's looking pretty good and we're going to drop in a couple of more to fill in holes and take a look. I'm liking how that's come together pretty well. I'm going to go ahead and combine all these into one layer so that we can move it around a little bit. Just wanted to point out and I had to keep in mind that this is 13.5 inch by 13.5 inch repeat. If this were to go on a couch for example, one of these rows with the leaves area would probably be about four inches wide. So you have to really visualize that and think about is that appropriate to have something that large all over the couch? Sometimes the scale, you might need to go up or down depending on what your overall look is. If you're not real clear, a good practice is to print that out on just a regular piece of paper and just place it on the couch to see if you think the scale is right or if it needs to go up or down. But I think that's a bit much for a flower, so I'm going to refer these flowers anyway, they're [inaudible]. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller and also because I want to show you about ones and holes. I'm just going to drop in about where I think it repeated. Then right away you can see that we've got a line right here. It's very obvious. I didn't do a very good job bringing the repeats together but that would be a problem if you had that on a couch every 13.5 inches, you would absolutely notice that. Actually it's both repeat points, so it's here and here. That's something that you would need to be aware of and work out before your pattern is considered complete. Now, there's a couple of things we could do here. We could try to pick this up and maybe move it over a little bit but then it's not going to look quite right with the rest of the repeat. Another way to take care of issues like this, you can come in sometimes and move certain elements. You just have to remember that if it is repeating exactly, then if you move an element here you would need to move it throughout the pattern. But you can see how just moving that stem into the line area, moving this here into this area starts to break that up. You could do that again on the other side with this other one. You're getting into that space where it's going to help break that line up. Now, also I wanted to talk to you about holes. If we were to take one of these elements, let's just say this [inaudible] and move it out of the way, like down here. Your eye already sees that there's a structure to this pattern so when it's looking at the pattern is automatically going to recognize that there's a weird space right here. Your eye wants it to be here. Just when you're doing your pattern after you're done you need to repeat it out in both directions and just look out for things like that. Look out for lines, look out for holes and fix all of those before you complete your pattern and color it. I'm going to stop here and then I will finish this pattern and show you what the end product looks like but for now that's all we need to see. Okay, and here it is. This is the somewhat finished version of this pattern. I would probably go in and where the little rose is with the leaves I probably would do several of those motifs so that it doesn't look quite the same, it would make it more interesting. But you can see how the layout worked out and how I colored it to tie into that trend. Then also I added some texture in the background to try to help with the line issue that was occurring. Then the final thing I wanted to point out, we talked about feature patterns, coordinates, and planes. Throughout this lesson I've sprinkled those in there, I don't know if you noticed that or not. But this is just a more straightforward example of what I'm talking about. You can see here two examples of feature patterns, coordinates, and planes. The feature pattern tends to be the most interesting, it's usually the largest scale but not always, but typically it is the largest scale. The coordinate is typically a medium-scale that would work well with the feature. Then a plane can literally be a plane like a plane wave or it could be just a tiny pattern that's more textural or looks like a plane from afar. I will say that as time has gone on, the coordinates have changed. It used to be that you would pull an element from the feature pattern to make a coordinate and that still happens today but with a more eclectic style that's occurring in the market right now. You also see elements like this, like in both of these examples the coordinate was not pulled from the feature but you could see how those might go together in a room. I tend to do that right now when I'm designing my feature coordinates and planes, I tried to take a more eclectic view point and you can do either. I just wanted to point that out. 6. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Wow, we've covered a lot together. I hope you've learned a ton about the home decor upholstery market, and how your unique style might fit into it. At the end of the day, understanding the market and the end-users needs will give you a serious advantage over other surface pattern designers looking to get into the same marketplace. Creating artwork that works for both the fabric and furniture manufacturers as well as speaks to the trends that consumers demand is a win-win. When you approach possible buyers for your art, you'll be so appreciated for the work you've done to understand their needs. Have your creative juices been flowing? Can you envision your art on the newest line of furniture? You've got everything you need now. You've walked through the basic trend research and have an idea to pursue. You understand the market, and the parameters to work within. You know how to look out for repeat issues as you design your feature pattern. So now it's your turn. Get started on your project. When you're done, load it into the project gallery for feedback and encouragement. I can't wait to see what you do and to cheer you on. Thanks again so much for joining me. If you haven't already, download your class handout at @textiledesignpro.com/homedecorupholsteryhandout. While you're there, say hello or stop by my social links and connect with me. I would love to hear from you. [MUSIC]