Design Debate

Oh, I kind of love these paintings, just slivers of life preserved in all their vibrant beauty. You can feel the sun on your face, the textures of the wooden surfaces, grass underfoot and bask in the wonderful everyday. Bobby Bowers of Melbourne, Australia, seems to capture a nostalgic suburbia that feels comforting and cosy. I love the titles too, ‘What Night Is Bin Night?’ and ‘A Shake Of A Lamb’s Tail’. Just lovely. The acid yellows and verdant foliage speak of a different world to mine, and I love to visit it through his works of art. Originally found at The Design Files . You might also like Tables of Colour Soaking up the Atmosphere of Clare Caulfield's Artworks Drawn to the Art of Trees

I do love the act of scribbling a note. I mean, I use my phone for note-taking all the time, but there really is no substitute for picking up a pen and scrawling a note, a sketch, or a message as you head out the door to a loved one. The issue is that sticky notes are not brill for the environment. They curl up, fall away and, once you've finished with that particular thought, that's normally the end of them. So I rather like the idea behind M Note, a reusable take on the familiar little square. It hasn't tried to reinvent the sticky note too much either, which I think is part of its charm. M Note has a wipe-clean, whiteboard-style surface, with a magnetic layer and reusable adhesive on the back. So you can move notes around, stack them up, wipe them clean and use them again. Bravestorming says the backing can be reused more than 10,000 times – that's a lot of scribbling! I can see these working particularly well for mood boards and tho...

I thought I would share the calendar we produced at Pickle Design for 2025. We've been creating these limited-edition calendars as gifts for clients and local businesses for around 20 years, and coming up with a new theme each time has become something of a tradition. Over the years we've illustrated everything from collective nouns for birds and time travel to an alphabet of graphic design, Cornish food and drinks from around the world. In 2014 we devoted the calendar entirely to iconic chairs , so for 2025 we decided to revisit the idea of design classics, but this time broaden things out. We’d also returned to the subject in 2016, asking what makes an iconic design a true design classic . We chose twelve objects whose shapes have become so familiar that you can recognise them from surprisingly little information. The Anglepoise lamp and Coca-Cola bottle are perfect examples. Rather than draw each object in full, we reduced them to partial silhouettes, lea...

Bentwood chairs in a café. At Pickle Design , where I work, we have a real appreciation of design classics. Those pieces of iconic design that transcend trends and are just, well, beautiful. They inspire countless generations of creatives and, as it turns out, our calendars too. For our 2025 poster calendar we focussed on 12 design classics, illustrated in minimal detail with pure white. You can see the finished Design Classics Calendar here . We also explored chair design in an earlier calendar. June 2017 saw us illustrate and celebrate Thonet's coat stand. The calendar theme reminded me of the newsletters we produced a few years back, celebrating iconic pieces of design , including the Thonet coat stand . We had one, if not an original then certainly closely inspired by one, in our hallway growing up. I think I took it for granted, slinging my coat on its wonderfully curvaceous hooks. But having taken the time to understand the process more...

The textile industry is changing, and it is exciting to see the new material innovations appearing. I have quite a few pieces made from bamboo in my wardrobe – I love the softness – and the latest material to catch my eye is even more unexpected: aloe vera. That much-loved natural soother is better known in our house as the plant we use for burns and homemade moisturiser, but Kirkby Design has taken it somewhere rather different. Aloe is a washable, wide-width sheer made from 60% aloe vera and 40% organic cotton. Soft, fluid and rather beautiful. The thinking behind it is clever too. Kirkby Design says the aloe vera used for the fabric grows without chemicals or fertilisers and does not require watering, while the organic cotton is grown without pesticides or fertilisers. The finished textile is light and sheer, allowing daylight to filter softly through it. I also like that all the environmental thinking hasn't compromised how it lo...

I have been pondering Brutalism lately, a very polarising form of architecture, and as with many things, I feel conflicted about it. My secondary school in Crawley, West Sussex, was cold, draughty, stark and grey, and not a building I liked at all. I compared it to the mainly Victorian – and considerably smaller – one I had left behind in Alresford, Hampshire. That had warm red bricks and chunky radiators you could sit on. I think that concrete enclosure was perhaps my first real taste of post-war architecture, and it seemed so at odds with my quintessentially British design sensibility. Paul Catherall's print of Coventry Station There was, however, something quite intriguing about the shapes of Brutalist architecture. I remember being in London once for an exhibition at the Barbican. The famous complex felt as though it had emerged from a dystopian novel, but at the same time I liked being there. It was calm, certain and imagination-provoking. My natural leaning...

As September draws to a close the trees are losing their leaves and our landscape is changing. Trees permeate every view at my house and I love experiencing the passing of the seasons through their transitions. The darker evenings perhaps turn me to more introspective art, and today in particular the work of American painter and printmaker Robert Kipniss caught my eye. Kipniss was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1931 and grew up in an artistic household. He was already drawing and painting as a child and, at 16, attended classes at the Art Students League of New York. But it wasn't only visual art that interested him. He began writing poetry in 1948, studied literature at Wittenberg College and then the University of Iowa, graduating with a degree in English before completing his MFA in 1954. Remarkably, his first solo exhibition in New York came in 1951 while he was still a student. Painting and writing continued alongside each other fo...