DECORATING HAS GONE DIGITAL
Printers make things like wallpaper, cloth and tile completely customizable
Want to have a custom floor, wallpaper or curtain design in your house that’s unique and perfectly suited to your taste? Even if your budget for this is minuscule?
Digital printing, the same technology the ink-jet printer in your home office uses, is making this possible. It is revolutionizing the textile, tile and wallpaper industries, and in the process opening up the world of custom design to anyone. A deep knowledge of manufacturing techniques, dyes, fabrics, fibres, papers, glazes and inks — expertise that generally takes a professional designer years to acquire — is no longer a prerequisite. You only need to know how to use a personal computer and how to upload your own original artwork or photographs onto a manufacturer’s website.
Another plus with digital printing for home interior products: There is no minimum order required. You can order just enough fabric for drapes for one window, wallpaper for one wall, floor tiles for a front entry or material in even smaller quantities.
With printed fabric, for example, you can replace a large manufacturing plant and multiple pieces of equipment with one very large digital ink-jet printer about the size of a two-and-a-half-metre cube in an area about the size of a threecar garage. The printing process itself has been streamlined. You no longer need a separate run for each colour.
I designed fabric (for US$17.50 to US$38 a yard) and wallpaper on spoonflower.com, the only website I found that offers both of these options. It was not hard to create a simple, hand-drawn motif that was pleasing to the eyes and upload it to the site. The really hard part was creating a motif that is equally pleasing as it repeats across a wall or on a sofa, without cutting off heads in the wrong place or creating some other jarring visual.
The site shows how a proposed wallpaper pattern would look in a room with furniture or, on its sister website, roostery.com, how a fabric pattern would look on a pillow or as a placemat. For most people, the easier path will be to customize a design that is already offered.
If you’re comfortable with fewer choices, minted.com (for US$32 to US$34 a yard) offers a limited menu. For most of the nearly 600 fabric designs featured on the Minted Home section, you may change only one colour (usually the background), and the choices are usually limited to four or five. For the more adventurous, weave up. com (for US$17.99 to US$39.99) offers nearly unlimited customization options for its 10,000 fabric designs. Not only can you change as many as 12 colours in the same pattern, but each colour also can be any one of more than 1,600 that you select from a colour wheel that appears on the screen with the pattern to be customized.
I found only one downside here. These three websites offer plenty of online tutorials and blogs. And Spoonflower has published the extremely helpful The Spoonflower Handbook, but there is no option for connecting with a real person if you get stuck.
By contrast, the two tile websites that I explored, imagesintile.com and MIPA’s custom colour system. it, based in Modena, Italy, are very accessible to their customers, perhaps because they offer unique services that cannot be easily handled online.
MIPA’s tiles are still handmade, using an intaglio technique developed more than a century ago. But you select the tile pattern and colours at MIPA’s site, choosing among five floor patterns, 80 individual tile patterns, and 29 traditional and contemporary colours.
And unlike all the other websites, which have large online catalogues, imagesintile.com specializes in creating one-of-a-kind tile murals, using images that its customers upload. Of all the websites that I tried, theirs was the easiest to use because all you do is upload your photograph or artwork, and the site handles the rest.