Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen archive: following our story this week on wallpaper for faking a Renaissance palazzo, here’s a roundup of all Dezeen’s stories about wallpaper. See all the stories »

See all our archive stories »

Skeletons, shadow puppets and more in an illustrator’s new line of playful wall adhesives

When Megan Herbert was renovating her apartment she found herself drawing “pictures and little things straight onto the walls themselves.” Now the Reykjavik-based illustrator has a better option in her eight different removable wall decals by The Wall Sticker Company.

With Art Deco style, “Waterfall” wraps around door frames and other corners, complete with stylized swimmers. An all-over print consisting of birds, butterflies and flowers depicted as if cross-stiched fulfills Herbert’s longstanding goal of designing wallpaper. Like her DIY originals, which she says aren’t “immediately obvious or dominating,” when you look twice her designs add “character and humor to the room.”

Whether a single focal feature or large-scale repeating pattern, each of the carbon-neutral wall adhesives comes in a few colors for versatility. The PVC-free reusable adhesives are “pretty much indestructible,” the native Australian adds, making it easy to transfer them to a different room or reconfigure their placement several times over. Herbert told us they are already dreaming of future motifs, but the current crop sells online from The Wall Sticker Company‘s shop, with prices spanning $55-145.

Also on Cool Hunting: Commonality and Vinarþel

Carnovsky takes their colorful RGB wallpaper to London in a jungle-themed exhibition

Lighting up Milan’s famed wallpaper studio Jannelli & Volpi last spring with their collection of mesmerizing
“RGB” wall coverings, Carnovsky will continue to entrance gallery-goers with a new jungle-inspired series at London’s Jaguar Shoes, dubbed “La Selva.”

Founded in ’97 by Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla, the Milan-based duo create surfaces that change and interact with different chromatic inputs to a stunning degree. Using a layering technique to create various colorful and slightly baroque effects, the jungle’s dense vegetation makes the perfect subject for Carnovsky to work with next.

The superimposition of three different images—each a single color—creates a visual chaos where tones, lines and shapes overlap in an ethereal display of emotion. When viewed through a colored lens or shown under a different shade of light the individual layers can be shown or hidden to reveal the elements of the composition.

Karnovsky uses wallpaper as a sort of contemporary mural, creating completely immersive environments that feel like a surreal dream. The general theme of the subjects is metamorphosis, to narrate a story of the things through the idea of their unceasing mutation and transformation.

“La Selva” will be on view from 28 July through 21 September 2011 at Jaguar Shoes in Shoreditch.

Marimekko celebrates their 60 years with a DIY book and crowd-sourced exhibit in Milan

Over the past 60 years Finnish brand Marimekko has splashed their colorful patterns on everything from sneakers to computer mice, spreading their vision of “happiness, colors and relationships” around the world. Founder Armi Rata once said, “I always wanted to gather people to get them to know each other, enrich their experience and take advantage from this knowledge.”

A riff on this collaborative premise, the iconic brand recently showed the results of a crowd-sourced Facebook competition in an exhibit at Jannelli & Volpi’s Milanese shop to celebrate Marimekko’s 60 years.

Inviting more than 34,000 Facebook fans to be part of the collective global project, the task was to show what they could do with Marimekko fabrics. The most interesting ideas were published on the Marimekko website, while the best authors were invited to the brand’s Helsinki headquarters last March to take part in a Marimekko workshop. The upshot of these creative days became the subject of the group show.

An accompanying book called “Surrur” reveals the creative process behind many Marimekko designers. It also includes an array of DIY projects for transforming common objects into playful products, or how to start from scratch.

Here’s to many more years of Marimekko patterns!

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