This week’s Spoonflower design contest is to create a Mod wallpaper design, using only 3 colors (plus black or white optional).   When I was a teen, I had one wall of my bedroom papered with an op art design (much like this one by Alberto Biasi), and though I’m not sure it fits in the Modernist Subculture, I decided to go with an op art inspiration for my design.

I started by creating a simple grid of circles.  Then, using the Adobe Illustrator distort options, I played with different options.

Here’s one of the versions.  A problem with creating the design this way was making sure it would look good in repeat–too often the edges of the design didn’t match up well and there wasn’t an easy way I could think of to correct that.

To take care of the issue of the repeat edges not matching, I decided to work with circles within a circle.  I created my basic design by overlaying a circle on top of the grid of smaller circles.  Then I applied the Envelope Distort command in Illustrator (see below).

This gave me my basic design unit of a circle with distorted circles inside — something like a globe.

The rules limited the design to 3 colors, and I chose red, orange and yellow.  My first attempt at a design was this one, but I didn’t like the grid effect.  I also realized that I had too many of the smaller circles inside the larger circle, so I changed that for later designs.

For this version, I put the colors on a diagonal.

I tried filling in the spaces between the globes with smaller globes, but it got too cluttered.

Next I tried alternating the colors of the circles within some of the globes.  Here’s one version.

And here’s another version.

In the end, I chose this simple design.  Also, this has fewer circles within the globes so they stand out more. Since the colors and shapes remind me of oranges, lemons and grapefruit, I call it Citrus Mod.

Here’s a mock-up of the design used as wallpaper, from the Spoonflower website.

You can see all the contest designs here.

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