Hypno is a piece of pattern design built around a production problem. Printing on curved glass is hard, and this pattern design is made so that the thing that usually ruins the print becomes impossible to see.
The problem on a curved surface
Plates and bowls are curved and deep, and pad printing them is difficult. The pad or the piece shifts slightly during printing, and on a curved surface that shift is hard to avoid. With a single colour you can sometimes hide it. With more than one colour, any slip throws the layers out of register and the pattern breaks, so the piece becomes waste. Centring matters too, if the print sits even slightly off, the design fails at the edges. Deep, curved forms like plates and bowls deform the most, so they carry the highest risk.
Designing the error out
Instead of fighting the shift, I approached the pattern design so it would absorb the error. The starting point was nature, the concentric rings of a tree trunk, circles that are never evenly spaced and never perfectly round. That irregularity is the whole idea. Hypno is a field of concentric rings drawn the same way, deliberately uneven in spacing and line. Because the pattern is already irregular by design, a small shift in printing does not read as a mistake. There is nothing correct for the eye to measure the slip against, so the misregister that would ruin a neat pattern simply disappears into this one.
It works in two colours, a base colour with black, which is exactly the case where slippage normally causes the most damage. Here the two layers can move a little and the pattern still holds. The tolerance is built into the design instead of demanded from the machine.
The pattern that hypnotises
The same irregularity that solves the problem also gives the pattern its pull. Concentric rings drawing the eye toward the centre already create an optical effect, and making them uneven makes it stronger, the surface seems to move and vibrate. Hypno was made in a base colour with black, in yellow, red and blue versions, each keeping that hypnotic depth. The technical fix and the visual identity are the same decision, which is what good pattern design can do, carry meaning and function in the same marks.
Where it stands
Hypno was produced and sold, and at the time it entered Paşabahçe’s permanent pattern collection. It came from a simple exchange, the team described where prints were failing, and I designed a pattern that made those failures invisible. For me that is the quiet satisfaction of it, a decorative pattern that is also a piece of production logic, solving a real problem on the factory floor while looking like pure ornament.
Read the full design story on Behance.
Discover other pattern and product projects by Sinem Hallı.
Pattern and design: Sinem Hallı, Award-winning Industrial Designer
Client: Paşabahçe