Metropolitan Home just released its design 100 issue. The editors describe the issue as a celebration of “one hundred of the best homes, architects, designers, buildings, materials, furnishings, housewares, trends, shopping venues, restaurants, green goods, activists, accessories, ideas and mores from the many worlds that make up the design universe.”

JPD is thrilled to announce that our Irezumi design created in partnership with Ink Dish and Sunset Strip Tattoo artist Paul Timman is number two! We are thrilled to be bringing tattoo art to a larger audience.

For more information check out www. inkdish.com

Eco green
The push for environmental awareness is reflected with shades of green from electric jades to subdued olives. Look for leaves and other foliage forming bright, attractive patterns.

Orange and Yellows
Fun and vibrant these statement colours are making a big impression on the catwalk in Derek Lam and Lanvin’s bright orange and yellow dresses. When used in interiors these hues stand out against subdued backgrounds and add warmth and drama to any living situation.

Gothic Glam
A return to old school Hollywood glamour, with a darker twist. Materials play a big part of this style in fashion with lace, sequins, pearls and patent leather paired with gold metallics. On the table, black is here to stay and it’s more dramatic than ever.

Ethnic Brights
Vibrant ethnic prints are raising their profile using this season’s oranges and yellows. Native American patterns using feathers and coloured leather as well as African motifs and Asian batiks make a great look for interiors.

Whimsical Graphics
Quirky, hand drawn patterns are making their way on to more surfaces. Originally seen in illustration and paper goods, their popularity in blogs and hand made products are bringing these playful patterns into the mainstream. Eccentric and abstract, they can add humour and interest to the table

Jason Solarek on his blog Tableware and Homegoods Marketing Strategy recently quoted an article in the New York times about  how fashion designers are using the web to design new collections. He wondered if the same could be said about tableware and home goods designers. As a tableware designer I find myself relying on the Internet more and more as a giant sourcebook for design ideas. I used to spend hours making my way through design magazines for trend predictions and creative inspiration but like everything these days, the practical side of technology has overtaken the need to buy as many magazines and books. Here are a few reasons why.

1. The cost. Websites are free and subscriptions to magazines can add up to quite a hefty bill if you look at it over time.
2. Convenience. Big bulky magazines and sourcebooks can be heavy to lug around especially if you do a lot of travelling or work in different locations. Anything that catches my eye these days on the web I right click on and save  in my ‘inspiration folder’.
3. Variety. To get a greater insight into different niche markets requires a lot of digging around and a lot of different books to get the information needed. An hour or so on Google is all you need to learn about the style of Rio De Janiero’s emerging street art or the decorative scrolls of the French Renaissance. Google images have been particularly helpful on one or two of the more vague commissions we’ve been asked to do.
4. Bias. Being the cynic that I am when you are reading a magazine you never know how or why exactly something is being featured. In the back of my mind I am always thinking that a big PR firm has paid lots of money to persuade me that so and so is the next greatest thing. Blogs, on the whole at least are written because a person is passionate about something. Rarely do they get paid and that leaves the writer with the freedom to write whatever they want. There numerous blogs for example la la lovely things , absolutely beautiful things and the always excellent especially if you’re a pattern junkie print pattern blogspot, that are just personal voyages into the whims and lusts of passionate creative people that have gone out and traveled far and wide and have taken the time to share all the wonderful things they have found along the way. You can’t get better inspiration than that.

One thing that the Internet cannot provide however is the simple joy that the latest copies of Vogue and Art Et Decoration, a large cup of tea and some post it notes can provide. This indulgent activity never felt like work and the blissful hours spent scrolling through the pages of www.etsy.com as wonderful as it is will never make me forget that.

One of the most widely anticipated events of Liverpool’s 2008 capital of culture year was the Gustav Klimt exhibition at the Tate gallery. On the ground floor is a reconstruction of the Beethoven Frieze from the secession building in Vienna. The contrast of the highly decorated gold on the rough unfinished concrete is striking in its delicateness. It reminded me of Bernardaud’s gold leaf and silver leaf dinnerware, the roughness of the gold leaf contrasting against the highly polished smoothness of the porcelain.  In fact, a few of Bernardaud’s luxurious new designs remind me of Klimt with their brightly coloured circles paired with lavish gold and silver metallics.

It is clear throughout the exhibition that Klimt was incredibly accomplished at painting life like representations. However, he appeared most comfortable when his paintings took a turn to fantasy. For a designer, what’s most exciting is what lies behind the figures in his paintings. He has a gift for patterns and colours. He could almost be described as a decorator. Sections of the backgrounds could stand on their own as fabrics and wallpapers. 100 years after it was first exhibited his stylised flowers are on trend today.  Similar flowers are seen on fabrics today on the catwalk and in the high street. Stella McCartney’s floral print dress comes to mind.

In addition to Klimt’s paintings the exhibition focused on the larger Vienna Secession group and the interaction between art, architecture, and interiors that it represented. As tableware designers we take direction from trends, not just in tableware but also fashion, interiors, and art. Dinnerware isn’t displayed by itself on a wall, but is part of people’s lifestyle.

The exhibit also gives us a look at the table with a beautiful set of flatware that looks strikingly modern by today’s standards and an equally contemporary silver coffee set. Only when you see old photographs of it being used do you realise how ahead of its time Klimt and the Vienna Secession must have been.

The Business Design Center in Islington recently hosted New Designers, a collection of the best art and design degree shows in U.K and Ireland. This is a great chance to see the future design talent of Britain in one large, badly air conditioned space. The talent varies from year to year, with this year being particularly good. Although, no matter how talented the students the reality is that the vast majority will never become old designers. The best girl from my year was plucked from New Designers to show at DKNY on Bond Street which propelled her to gallery showings throughout Europe. Five years on she is doing quite well, but out of the design world.

What makes this show so wonderful is that it is raw. By the time trends hit the high street they are often watered down versions of the original idea. Of course, they are also practical, commercial, and hopefully profitable. All of these designers have talent, the ones who make it will also have the ability to refine their ideas so that they are commercial without losing the spark that makes them stand out.   But for this show it is the crude, powerful, unrefined work that triumphs over the conventional. To that end, Elisabeth Petch who took the trend for urban art and made it even more urban stood out. Her large canvasses of grimy, industrial signage were wonderful.

The theme of funky, illustrative line drawings was extended by Karen Thompson onto dinnerware where she mixed photographic and painted motifs. The 80’s are still an influential decade for this group and showed themselves in angular computer graphics and silhouettes of Run DMC and other influences at the time of breakdancing and the birth of rap. Like most of the work in this show that style was taken too far to be commercial, tableware with too much coverage, textiles that are too in your face, and all in all, just too wonderful to make it in the mainstream.

Barcelona is a city well known for its style. From modernism to noucentisisme, its artistic heritage is evident from the world-renowned architecture of its buildings to the look of the people that inhabit them.

Nowhere is this more apparent then in the Barri Gotic and further from the Ramblas and not as obscured by touristy t-shirt vendors, in the Circuit del Born. This area is home to the Picasso, Contemporary Art and Textile Museums as well as countless galleries and trendy boutiques. The London equivalent would be Shoreditch, an artsy urban center where style is inherent. In El Born this is not just evident in the galleries and museums but in the graffiti stenciled in abandoned doorways to the skillfully modern design for signs for the more mundane businesses such as Laundromats.

Too often trends are copied by going through the motions. Bringing style to the plate is not as easy as partnering with a fashion designer and fitting their designs to new shapes. Tableware is much different then art on a canvass or fashions on the catwalk. It is a difficult line to walk as a designer between giving retailers what they think may sell because the style is on trend and ensuring that our transformation of the style is successful. For example, the 80’s look with a penchant for Mondrian style block color prints was successfully showcased in Barcelona but we have also seen this look dulled on the table. Designers have brought this to the table in a smaller scale borders on plates and although they have succeeded in bringing this trend over the energy that is fueled in part by the large scale is lost in translation.

The current style in Barcelona can be described as urban-punk and is evident in the graffiti on the walls and the piercings on the urbanites. Naive scribbled pen ink style sketches, as you may find on a vandalized school desk, are everywhere. We have begun to see this style on the table and expect it to pick up steam.

The Spanish aren’t scared of pattern or boldness and shops like Desigual engulf their clothing in striking metropolitan motifs in eye catching colors. We are yet to find evidence of this trend transferring to housewares in this city or elsewhere but expect it to arrive in asymmetrical layouts on plates and in reduced motifs on cups and saucers.

It seems as though the dinnerware pattern market is saturated with flowers, it always has been and it certainly doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon. This year saw the explosion of florals onto the runways and then in turn onto the high street. Big and bold, these were statement flowers, not shying away into pretty little borders. Flowers are everywhere and nowhere was this celebrated better than in Chelsea last week with the opening of the 2008 RHS Chelsea flower show. To join in the festivities the shops around Sloane Square were bursting with floral displays. My favourite was probably the very lavish Jo Malone store front, they seem to do a great job every year and I imagine spare no expense!

This morning I walked to Kings Road to do my usual trawl through the interior shops for inspiration. The gardens on Chayne walk were alive with sumptuous roses and I stopped to take a photo or two. Living in America you forget about how beautiful the gardens are here in England, that’s one advantage of all the rain, which I don’t miss. On Kings Road Osborne and Little were displaying some of their Hothouse wallpaper designs by Suzy Hoodless. These are bold designs with a very modern twist on floral decoration and very successful they are too. Across the road at Designers guild the flowers were in full bloom but these were more of a romantic English style, beautifully done but nothing I hadn’t seen before.

Geometrics abstracts and other types of vegetation will always play second fiddle to the ever-popular floral surface pattern designs, it’s our job as designers to keep reinventing and moving them forward. We’re always the first ones to get bored afterall!

A letter-sized, PDF version of our presentation on tableware trends is now available to download through ‘Resources’ to the right of our blog posts. The presentation consists of five mood boards and headline points for the trends that we see coming to the table.

We made our second annual visit to the Chicago International Home and Housewares Show. The McCormick Center is an enormous space, however, the show felt a lot more compact than the Frankfurt show and altogether less daunting. It may be the layout, with high-end and mass-market tableware not separated by floor. In fact, the tableware section of the show exhibited kitchen gadgets and cutting boards in booths right next to tableware. This presented us with the opportunity to meet Chef Ming Tsai as he happened to be promoting Totally Bamboo cutting boards right down the way from a booth where we had an upcoming appointment and half an hour to kill.

Corelle had an impressive theatrical booth with models acting as mannequins in green dresses slowly and robotically showing off World Kitchens latest collections. The Oneida stand was also impressive displaying their latest flatware and dinnerware designs.

With the show being so close to Frankfurt there wasn’t much of a visible shift in trends. There is still an industry emphasis on florals, damasks, and monochromes. One style that did stand out, although, more of an emphasis of the US market then a trend, is folk design. The US has had a long-standing love affair with the country kitchen style of roosters and gingham. In a similar vein seaside scenes of lighthouses and beaches are much more popular in the US market and thus more prevalent at this show.

Styles are often born in France or the UK and make their way later to popularity in the US market. In fashion and technology often making a longer journey from Japan, to Europe, and onto the US. Predicting which styles catch on, and the timeline of those styles is key. And then there are the roosters that grow up in the middle of the US and seem to stick around for eternity.

Statement Colours -> Neons & Brights
This season’s kaleidoscopic colours make bold statements. From electric blues, acid yellows, hot pinks, emerald greens, to the leader of the pack: neon orange. These hues work best in block colours, standing out against blacks or paired with subtle neutrals such as greys and beiges.

Artistic Brush Strokes
The Jackson Pollock inspired paint splatters seen on the catwalk cross over effortlessly to interiors. Expressive splashes and dribbles are a great fit for the table.

Florals
From soft seventies meadow flowers to bold expressive botanicals, florals are still proving to be a fashion staple. This style will continue to strengthen developing more edgy blooms and exaggerated silhouettes.

Geometrics
Geometrics will take the form of ethnic patterns and abstracted African prints in this season’s neons developing from the Eighties Rubik’s Cube style angular graphics.

Figurative Graphics -> Comic Book Chic
Comic book colours, cartoon figures, surreal decorative icons, and punk graphic scenes. Inspired by the emergence of urban art and graffiti in mainstream popular culture.