Making Design: Recent Acquisitions

Making Design: Recent Acquisitions
How do designers today use line, form, texture, pattern, and color to formulate and communicate their design solutions? These five elements of design—also discussed in the adjacent gallery—are presented here through contemporary works acquired by the museum within the last seven years. Lines compose the dynamic gestural quality of a Chinese character on a poster and articulate the subtle creases captured in porcelain cups and saucers. Intricately engineered three-dimensional forms create lively pop-up books, which have similar kinetic properties to those of an origami-like lamp. Texture can be as surprising as the Drywall wallcovering to your left or as tempting to touch as the white Chanel book in the case behind you. Pattern is sometimes mutable, with shifting data changing the visual mapping of this information as in Flight Patterns, or infinitely variable like the prototypes for the Grid textile. Finally, color, whether dramatically deployed in abstracted rays of orange in the Aeron chair poster or subtly woven into a traditional pin stripe, commands attention with its bold expressive power. What do you see?