Freebie Friday 3

This time, for Freebie Friday, were serving up an iPhone5 optimized digital wallpaper for our Downtown Hub pattern. Click the image for the full resolution download and come back next Friday for another!

The Overlook Hotel Remixed by The Detroit Wallpaper Co.

Michael Hanlon, one of our designers thought to ask, "what if Stanley Kubrick asked The Detroit Wallpaper Co. to design the carpet pattern in The Shining's Overlook Hotel?" Here's the original pattern which is certainly amazing in it's own right:

Now, here's a glance at what it would look like if we had our hands in the mix.

Onion Skin

Goldrush

Turnkey Chevron

Spot

Leaf

Wanderwalls: Where Would You Go?

Our Wanderwalls collection is filled with some referential patterns to some of what we think are the most beautiful places on earth. From the U.S.A. to Africa to China, our diverse culture as a people serves as an endless palette of color, form, pattern and style to choose from when it comes to decorating our environments. Below are a couple examples...

Dia De Los Muertos

Forbidden City

I Heart Paris

We really feel like we have brought to life some beautiful highlights of human culture but we have a question for you. What places can you think of that would be a great place for us to explore when bringing you new additions of our Wallgazer line? Do the rich saturated colors of Jamaica's villages or the impossibly intricate sand mandalas of Tibet seem like the perfect inspiration for a pattern to you?Where would you like The Detroit Wallpaper Co. to take you next?

5 Type Foundries We Love

A good designer is only as sharp as his typographic arsenal. That's not entirely true, if your work isn't typically type heavy, but it's of great importance for most of us creatives working in the digital realm. We payed homage to it's importance with one of our patterns in our Wallgazer collection, modestly titled Printing Blocks.

With that being said, we'd light to shine a light on some of our favorite type foundries. These are just a few places that we feel are doing a great job keeping our eyes happy when it comes to the written word.

Face37

Process Type Foundry

House Industries

Lost Type

Okay Type

Art Zines

So, if you recall the 80's and 90's, one of the staples were those hand written, photocopied and staple bound bits of personal excitement known as zines. Typically focused around music and social politics, these were what you might call handcrafted paper blogs.

Today, now with the advent of the internet, blogs, RSS, social media, digital imagine software, desktop publishing, itunes and so many other technological advances, zines, as they were intended initially are sort of archaic. This doesn't mean they've gone away though. There are plenty of people creating some really fascinating zines with directives sometimes much different from their predecessors. What we're most interested in is the host of art, design, illustration and photo zines that have taken up residence not only on the shelves of mom and pop book stores but all over the internet as well. The Detroit Wallpaper Co. certainly enjoys not only the creativity and craftsmanship that goes into these works, but the effort to conceive create and self distribute the material, much like we do with our wallpaper collections. Take a look at some of these great looking examples:

Instamatics by Glitterbrain

Please Be Brave by dethpsun

Please Be Brave by dethpsun

Endangered Species by Helen Entwisle

Endangered Species by Helen Entwisle

Through DIY distribution channels such as Etsy, and home printing becoming more and more impressive, as well as economical, these DIY published works of art are becoming more prevalent as well as more lavish. For an easy look through a large library of what's available, look no further than Etsy's own Art Zine section.

The Original Detroit Blogger - John Carlisle

John Carlisle writes not only for The Metro Times has been writing for his detroitblog.org since 2006 and truly has his finger on the pulse of the city. Always interesting, detroitblog.org features stories about residents businesses, business owners, politics, architecture, events and just about anything else you can think of as it relates to our great city. If you want a great peek through the window of the Motor City, this is a fine place to get it.

What Has Us Pinterested!

We at The Detroit Wallpaper Co. love to share what keeps us interested and inspired so we've developed personal boards for ourselves on our Pinterest page to share with you. Swing by and take a look at what keeps our pulse going!

Freebie Briday 2

It's Freebie Friday again at The Detroit Wallpaper Co. and this time we have another iPhone wallpaper, this time from our FABrics collection. The title is Prairie Look and we thought it would lend itself nicely to the mobile arena. Enjoy!

Shannon Kaye and The Detroit Wallpaper Co.

Shannon Kaye is an eco-conscious interior designer, fine artist, paint and color expert and television host whose eclectic colorful, and unexpected designs go into creating well-curated homes. As Host of DIY Channel’s makeover show, Fresh Coat, Shannon offered her signature color, pattern and paint advice on a variety of residential renovations.

Take a look at Shannon's articleS featuring her personal color customizations of some our patterns. We really enjoy her eye for both bold and contrasty picks as well as her more subtle arrangements.

Shannon Kaye's Website

The Detroit Wallpaper Co. Prezi

If you haven't had a chance, take a look at the Prezi we created for a dynamic tour of our collections and a "how to" on the color customization options we offer on our website.

Freebie Friday 1

So, we'd like to introduce you to something we would like to call Freebie Friday, here at The Detroit Wallpaper Co. We'll be offering digital versions of our work including both phone and computer wallpapers. This Friday, we present to you the first of what will be many iPhone5 wallpapers featuring our "Leaf" Pattern.

We hope you like it!

Patterns, Patterns EVERYWHERE!

Of course The Detroit Wallpaper Co. has a big place in it's heart for patterns. It's a staple of the business we're in, and it's driven by a natural affinity for the beautiful qualities of repetition in line, shape and color that we hold so close to ourselves individually as well as a company.

We're always looking for inspiration in that regard and we came across a great article that Wired magazine wrote a while back featuring some stunning natural patterns that we couldn't help but get fired up about when we saw them. Below, we posted some of the photos but you can check out the full article and gallery here.

We also took a gander around the studio to see if we could spot any of our own naturally occurring patterns. We quickly realized that on any given day, we wouldn't have to look far to find a little inspiration, right under our noses.

Zara: Vertical Integration at it's Current Finest

There was a news story this morning on NPR about Fashion Retailer Zara. Here's a piece from the story:


"Ortega built the world's biggest fashion company in a rainy, impoverished corner of northwest Spain — Galicia — where the 76-year-old has lived since he was a kid.

The son of a railway worker, Ortega went to work in a local shirt maker's shop at age 14 to help feed his family. Jose Martinez was Ortega's first colleague. He's 77 now and still works at that same shop called Gala.

"He may be the third-richest man in the world, but for me, he's just a good guy," Martinez says. "He came to work in my father's shop in 1951, so we became friends, Amancio and me."

More than 60 years later, Gala employees still sew shirts upstairs from where they're sold. That's a model Ortega took with him when he opened his first Zara store two blocks from Gala in 1975.

As the company grew, he kept production close to home — in Spain and Portugal — at a time when other chains were moving factories to Asia for cheap labor."

What we at Detroit Wallpaper Co. enjoy so much about the success of Ortega's company, Zara, is it's business management model titled "Vertical Integration". Simply put, vertically integrated companies are those that control several or all phases of their own product or service's supply chain. This means that Zara conceives, produces and distributes it's own product. There are a lot of great benefits to doing this. It keeps cost down, and shortens lead time on development significantly, allowing a company to respond to demand in a much quicker fashion than companies that have to rely on other companies to produce or distribute their product.

Kevin assembling our pattern books by hand.

Although we obviously are very different in nature from Zara, we use this same model. Our art department, production team, and main distribution hub all sits under one roof. We take our product from conception all the way to it's delivery by hand. Doing so not only affords us the ability to make a product as effectively and efficiently as possible, but it allows us to make changes and to develop new ideas much faster than if we had to rely on another team to help us through the process.

For more information on Zara and it's founder, Ortega check out the NPR story here.

New Pattern Sneak Peek: Inner Diamond

We're really excited about the new work we're getting ready to present and we thought it might be nice to give everyone else a glance through the looking glass at it. Here's a sneak peek at one of our newest wallpaper patterns, titled "Inner Diamond". A classically  geometric pattern coupled with what we think are some beautifully complimenting color choices from our hand picked palette. Per usual, this design and many more new patterns will be color customizable on our website when they are released later this year. We look forward to presenting it to you officially!

Our Reading List: Design and Culture Blogs

We at Detroit Wallpaper Co. have really tried our best to play to a unique sensibility in home decor and fashion. We absolutely do our best to not just create a product with current and modern sensibilities, but also give a respectful nod to the work that has influenced us all, in the years past. We not only look for that in our own designs, but thats a balance we take notice of in the work we look to for inspiration, motivation and cultural reference. Below you'll find some of our favorite reading with that in mind. Whether it's culture, fashion, home interiors or architecture, these blogs have their finger on the pulse, we enjoy them, and we hope you do too. 

Alternative art, dynamic design and visual culture - WebUrbanist features creative artistic, architectural, photographic and other amazing works as well as abandoned places, urban exploration and more.

Web Urbanist

http://weburbanist.com/

Design*Sponge is a design blog run by Brooklyn-based writer, Grace Bonney. Launched in August of 2004, the site updates between 6-8 times per day and was declared a “Martha Stewart Living for the Millennials” by the New York Times. Design*Sponge attracts a diverse group of devoted readers across the globe. Design*Sponge currently has 75,000 daily readers on the main site, over 127,000+ RSS readers, 405,000+ Twitter followers and 70,000+ Facebook followers. Click here for PRESS on design*sponge.

Design*Sponge founder Grace Bonney has a unique angle on the industry, having worked as a contributing editor at Domino, House & Garden and Craft magazines, and as a freelancer with top publications like New York Home, Food and Wine, In Style, Better Homes and Gardens, New York Magazine, CITY Magazine, Time Out New York Kids, Archinect, The New York Post, Everyday with Rachael Ray and others. In addition, she wrote a weekly design column for the Philadelphia Inquirer for two years and has worked as Style Editor of HGTV’s Ideas Magazine.

Grace has been a featured guest on Good Morning America, The Nate Berkus Show, The Martha Stewart Show and the Martha Stewart Radio Show and has been a keynote speaker with a wide variety of organizations ranging from design schools and trade organizations to design guilds and national corporations.

In addition, Grace also runs a national series of meetups for women running design-based businesses called the D*S Biz Lady Series. Grace hosts and speaks at these events designed to connect women running their own design-based businesses and provide free advice on the subjects of PR/marketing, legal concerns, business/financial decisions and wholesaling. She also founded the annual Design*Sponge Scholarship in 2007 to support up-and-coming art and design students. So far over $20,000 in prize money has been awarded to students across the country.

Design Sponge

http://www.designsponge.com/

The Freshome story began in Romania ( a small country in Europe ) back in 2007 when founder and CEO Micle-Mihai Cristian launched a blog that would go on to become one of the most popular and successful online magazines to date focusing on interior design and architecture. Currently clocking up an impressive 3.8+ million unique monthly visitors, the site provides daily inspiration and advice to those who are seeking to improve, organise and style their homes. With an archive of 7000+ posts featuring over 90,000+ images of great interior products and architectural projects it is no wonder that Freshome has one of the most engaged online communities on the net.

Freshome has grown to become an authority in its niche and its content is regularly picked up and shared by some of the most influential and widely read internet sites including Yahoo News, Gizmodo, CNET, and The Huffington Post. Freshome is regularly selected as being one of the top blogs on the net and Technorati rates it in the Top 100 blogs for the categories of Travel, Art, Living and Home, in which it ranks as the second most influential blog. Even Forbes has picked up on the success of the site, choosing to interview Micle Mihai and his team about the runaway growth that the blog has achieved since its inception.

Today, Freshome is the go-to destination for anyone who is passionate about design, architecture, luxury, travel, lifestyle and creativity in the home. Those who visit the site are seeking inspiration to help them on their journey to creating their dream home as well as practical solutions to the problems that their homes may present.  If this sounds like you, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up to our email newsletter so you never miss a post. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook as that’s where the real conversation takes place. We’re waiting to hear from you!

Freshome

http://freshome.com/

Founder & Editor Holly Becker is an American best selling author, freelance journalist, interiors stylist and workshop leader who lives in Hannover, Germany. She launched decor8 in January 2006 after a decade-long stint in the corporate world as a human resources and facilities project manager before design blogs became  popular. Holly wanted to write on topics that she felt passionate for and her goal was to live a more creative life and encourage others to do so and felt that leaving her career to start anew was a leap of faith she was willing to take.

From the ground up, Holly built decor8, an established site known as a reliable design resource worldwide to over 48,000 daily readers who tune in to see what she has found and to connect with Holly through the comments section on her blog. decor8 (a creative play on the word decorate) is a site dedicated to sharing honest opinions, fresh decorating ideas, beautiful interior spaces, independent art and design, products and services, and articles meant to inspire readers to live a more fulfilling, authentic and creative life.

Kevin Sharkey, Senior Vice President and Executive Editorial Director, Decorating, and Executive Creative Director, Merchandising for Martha Stewart Living Omninedia, Inc. (MSLO), calls Holly Becker a, ” World-renowned blogger” and refers to decor8 as one of the, “Most influential blogs out there”, stating that what she has built up is, “Quite an accomplishment.” With over a million page views per month, it’s no wonder why decor8 is known as a leading design blog. In addition, she has over 50,000 followers on Twitter, 140,000 followers on Pinterest, 45,000 followers on Facebook and 19,000 following her on Instagram.

Holly’s blog is updated daily throughout the week and features a curated selection of design finds from sofas to stationery along with product reviews, reader discounts, contests, book reviews, interviews, store and home tours, do-it-yourself projects, and trade show coverage. Topics range from decorating to small business ownership, travel, blogging and independent design — all meant to encourage and engage readers as well as connect them with talented emerging and established creative types around the world.

Her best selling interiors book, Decorate: 1,000 Inspirational Ideas For Every Room In Your Home, was published by Jacqui Small in London and Chronicle Books in America along with Murdoch Books in Australia and has enjoyed tremendous success claiming the #1 spot for Interior Design books on Amazon for nearly two years (so far) and was reprinted 4 times in both the US and UK. Decorate is now published in 12 editions including German by Callwey Verlag under the title, Lust auf Wohnen and is a best seller in Germany. Other languages include French, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Polish and Czech/Slovic.

Decor8 Blog

http://decor8blog.com/

Coochicoos was launched in 2005 to report on the growing modern design trends happening for baby decor, furniture, fashion, and baby gear.  Published by Robert Yang, a former architect and now a creative entrepreneur, Robert’s love for clean modern design inspires the stories featured on Coochicoos.  Robert lives in Los Angeles with his wife and 4 year old daughter, and also has a son in his senior year in college.

Since 2005, we have helped thousands of modern families discover that they don’t have to give up their modern design-sensibilities just because they became parents.  If you are a parent and love art, architecture, graphic design, tech, and travel, then we hope you find Coochicoos a resource that keeps you connected with what’s fresh and new for your growing family.

What we believe

We’re minimalists.  We don’t report on everything – after all who needs more stuff and clutter in their homes.  We believe that good design makes life easier and simplier, which means living with less stuff.  Coochicoos is also carefully edited to bring you just what we like.

Coochicoos

http://www.coochicoos.com/

Where to Wallpaper??

Love our patterns but you're not sure that you have a feature wall that could use the royal treatment? Don't fret. You don't need an entirely blank canvas to have an appropriate place to give your home some flair. Take a look at our Pinterest board creative wallpaper uses and then take a look around the house to see if you can't find a great way to add a little color to your home decor. And don't forget to follow us on Pinterest if you're an active user. We'd love to see what inspires you, too!

Product Feature

Here is a link to an amazing Furniture piece developed by Flying Cavelries. The piece uses comic book characters that are engraved into the face of the piece, to manage a truly refined look in a subject matter that can often be presented in a cheeky manor. This is a great example of balancing sophistication and fun when it comes to home decor. Photos and link below:

Crazy About Comics Collection Unit

Sample Swatches

Did You Know...

you can purchase sample swatches of any standard Detroit Wallpaper Company pattern, as well as a sample swatch of a customized color pattern you've built yourself? That's right. Just use the drop down menu when selecting your product and choose either the Standard or Custom Color option as shown below:

Here's a great idea as well. The 24" x 24" custom color samples can be used as decor with just a little bit of creativity. Take a look at what we did with a series of our Día de los Muertos pattern samples.