Orla Kiely

Orla Kiley is an Irish fashion designer based in London, described by The Guardian as 'the queen of print'. Her patterns are used on many objects including kitchenware, stationary, furniture and wallpaper.

She takes inspiration from popular patterns of the 1960's / 1970's and redesigns them to appear more current and fit in with today's modern decor. A lot of her designs are also inspired by contemporary art and architecture. She wants her patterns to be energised and have a sense of vitality.

I like the idea of making patterns from the 60's and making them a bit more modern, I have taken inspiration from Orla's work and want to create some patterns to potentially use in my own work.




I started designing my own patterns using a 1960's wallpaper pattern and an image from the bumble office as inspiration. I decided that instead of using flower patterns I would use the bumble logo as this makes it more fitting. The colours used are swatched from the office image to try and be consistent within their existing design. I chose to put white boarders around the rectangles of colour as this made it look more similar to the 1960's wallpaper I was using as reference. Accidentally the bumble logo ended up looking like a honey dipper which I thought was a nice touch.



I expanded on this pattern and made it repetitive. However I found it looked very boring and needed something adding to it.



I decided to make the patterns into flowers so that they dont look as random and I think it makes the idea much more subtle.

I imagine that these patterns will be used in the background of billboard designs or bus advertisements.