Thanks to Maarten, for the VIP tickets

Come and see the project Flosculus / Flower Power that studio:ludens helped building with Little Mountain and Philips at the STRP festival in Eindhoven, NL. Video footage of the installation is on its way.

At the lasercutter, people could use Magic Box (our parametric design tool) to create there own packaging. We used a humble material -corrugated cardboard- and turned it into something precious, worth giving and worth keeping.

Repper pattern on the surface. The flames of burning cartboard were mesmerizing to all of us.

The magic of technology revealed

Designing boxes with Harry, Magic Box master

A “bon-bon” box design by one of the participants

At another location in the TextielLab was a workshop making textile designs with Repper Pro. People could take a photo of anything, turn it into a pattern and print it on cotton. We don’t have the photos yet, but when you got the results, we’ll share them here on our blog!

We were featured on Brabant10, as part of the coverage of the Textiel Weekend. Check out the below video for our 5 minutes of fame on Brabant television:

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Last year Alex build a great little app for making box templates with any dimension you want. This year, Alex and Wouter elaborated on this idea and turned it into a parametric design tool. With the help of our dear interns (see previous post) we set up a website to promote the concept and a snappy video to explain it.

We already noticed that the Waag FabLab featured our tool and designs at PICNIC. Today, I was delighted to see a quick shot of our tool and some more of our parametric sunglasses design on Dutch news website nu.nl. Check the video below! You’ll see it quite early in the video, but for the impatient ones among you, skip to 0:20

Lotte will be focusing on the promotion of Repper & visual communication. She will also make sure we don’t neglect the “female side” of studio:ludens and compensate our nerdiness a bit!

Harry (Henri Louis for strangers) will be joining our efforts to keep improving the features and interface of Repper. He also has a broad range of interests and is very talkative, so he’ll make sure we get sufficiently distracted during the day!

They might be joining us during our upcoming events (NerdLab, TextielWeekend and Dutch Design Week), so if you want to meet them in person, just pop around during one of these activities.

We gladly donate 20% of our profits to Fight for Sight, a longstanding foundation that helps young eye-disease researchers get sufficient funding for their projects.

So get yourself a hyper-cool Code Tee and do a good deed as well!

All patterns have been made with Repper Pro and are based on the illustration “Kaleidoscopic” by Daniel Rossi.

All based on this illustration

Kaleidoscopic by Daniel Rossi

About Repper Pro

Repper Pro turns pattern-making into highly effective play. It offers smart features, packed into a clean interface for an incredibly low price.

Find out more about Repper Pro

About the artist

Daniel Rossi is an Eindhoven-based graphic designer and illustrator. He is originally from Canada. As he describes himself:

I don’t like to tag myself as anything in particular. Better said: I like boxes but not being put into one. This isn’t due to a lack of understanding about what it is I really do, but rather because above all I am lead by intuition. Being a graphic designer, come illustrator, artist who experiments in the tanglible world with furniture and interior spaces, I must rely on not one particular set of skills but many to carry out my work. Blurring the line between art and design is what helps me to achieve this. I believe that to fully explore a concept or idea one must build bridges and not barriers.

Daniel Rossi’s portfolio

Kaleidoscopic by Daniel Rossi

Spoonflower

Spoonflower is able to print any design you make with Repper. They have a variety of fabrics, including regular and organic cotton, linen-cotton and even exotics like bamboo-cotton. Prices range from 18 to 32 USD per yard (for metric-minded people: that’s about a square meter), with discount if you are the designer of the pattern.

Spoonflower online printing service

Click here to view the embedded video.

Little Mountain (the creative environment that studio:ludens is part of) also opened its doors and showed the wide variety of disciplines we have among us, including graphic design, product design, project management and architecture. Here is a short impression of the day. All photos can be found in the Open Day collection on Flickr.

Thanks to all visitors & mountaineers for a great day!

Busy, busy!

Look, it’s the upcoming studio:ludens intern crew! (Lotte & Henri)

With great grandeur, Hans is turning these kids into artists through his rock-painting masterclass

We themed the day “Fruitful” with tons of smoothy goodness

Patricia doing a little tour

more photos

Did you know:

you can go full screen?

Click on the + in the top right corner of the tool and click the ‘go full screen’ button. Press Escape to go back.

you can use your webcam to create funky effects?

Select video in the first menu. You have to allow Flash to use your webcam. Now you can create patterns from your room, face or anything else you can find directly. Want to pause the video? Click the button again.

you can set your twitter background directly?

Create a pattern you like and click the ‘Create Twitter background’ button. Fill in your Twitter username and password (don’t worry, we won’t store anything) and click ‘change now’ to update. It’s that easy!

you can use patterns created by others?

Over 100.000 patterns have been created so far. You can explore these patterns in the gallery.

Take a look at the tag cloud to find something you like. Did you know you can also look for patterns by color?

And the best thing: you can use these patterns in your own (non-commercial) projects for free! So get inspired by the creativity of others.

Enjoy creating patterns with Repper Lite!

Illustration by Carli Hyland

Tell us a bit about yourself. Are you a creative professional or do you spend your spare time on your own creative projects?

I am a photographer, illustrator and bookmaker, but I also do a bit of tiddling about with some design. I guess I’m a creative professional, I spend the majority of the working week designing and building books, on the weekends I shoot and in the evenings I process my photographs and create new ways of stitching books together. I recently illustrated a children’s book for Canadian writer Frank Streicher, soon to be published!

reindeer girl illustration by Carli Hyland

I am a bit of a drifter, I’ve moved about 16 times over the last four years across four countries, I’m dirt poor but I love that I’ve been able to travel to some many places!

How does Repper Pro help you in your creative projects?

Other than providing hours of uninterrupted entertainment…I use Repper mainly as a tool to create design features in my work. I’ve used it on funding and project applications, online backgrounds as well as backgrounds to some illustrations. Now that I have the ability to print hi-res I’ll be using it to create end papers for my books so that clients can potentially create their own patterns from their own photographs, giving them the possibility to further customise their albums.

Patterns as book end paper

What online and offline services do you use to turn your creative ideas into reality?

I love kuler! I think it’s a fantastic tool when you need some colour inspiration. For inspiration ‘out of the screen’ I look towards found objects (I am an avid collector of shopping lists found on the ground) and junk that I pick up around the many op shops in Newcastle. Generally I try to find the most resourceful way to produce an idea such as a large paper sculpture I recently made from old worn out books.

Paper mobile sculpture by Carli Hyland

What features would you like to see in the upcoming versions of Repper Pro?

I can’t wait to be able to make my own fabrics, my grandma was an awesome sewer for her five children and each time I go home to visit the farm I raid her cupboards which are filled to the brim with gorgeous vintage patterns!

We want to create design tools that can be used by as many people as possible. Do you think everybody has the ability to be a designer?

If you think about design as a consideration of the aesthetic and functional aspects of an object then I think it is possible for everyone to have the ability to be a designer, think of the Sunday roast! I think there are also a lot of ‘rules’ to design which makes it intimidating for people to break into. But with tools like Repper Pro I think it’s possible to create something that is visually appealing and unique and maybe that makes you a designer or maybe not but in the end you’ve created something specific to your own taste that you’ll enjoy.

Photo by Carli Hyland

Is there anything else that you would like to share?

I think Repper Pro opens up a whole new workflow for artists and makes a really wonderful bridge between art and design. Tools such as these open up so many possibilities to such a broad audience, I love that it can be used to simply play and enjoy as well as functioning as a professional tool.

Where on the web can we find you?

You can take a look at my portfolio and my blog.

We’d like to thank Carli for taking the time to share this with us. We wish her good luck with her own projects and we will certainly take her tips into consideration for improving our software.

illustration by Carli Hyland

illustration by Carli Hyland

Would you like to share your experiences in the world of (pattern) design with us? Drop us a line and we’ll do an interview with you (if you’re interesting enough )

Original photo by chwynyn

We think it would be incredibly cool to be able to apply patterns to imagery right in Repper and such a feature is definitely on our wish list for Repper Pro 2.0. Feel free to let us know what you think about this feature, dear Repper users!