Ornamental Design Prints

Prints of designs have always been of utmost importance in architecture, arts and crafts, and interior decoration in European countries. Indispensable to studios, they contributed to the rapid dissemination of ornamental innovations and helped to assert the newest styles. This special edition of Berliner s seminal work uses sumptuous illustrations and informative texts to present the development of engravings of ornament designs and the numerous variations on particular types of motifs. This compendium of the most beautiful, important and unusual ornaments from the fifteenth to the twentieth century offers an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists and those who are passionate about the genre."

Ornamental Design: An Image Archive for Artists and Designers is an essential resources for all creatives looking to access a treasury of downloadable high-resolution ornate artwork from the 17th and 18th-Century. Featured are cartouches, sconces, pendants, frame designs, Rocaille ornaments, scrolls, decorative arms and armour motifs and more.

Engraved in the 19th century, these flamboyant ornamental designs are based on a wide variety of historical examples, dating back as far as the 1500s and including images by Watteau and Dürer.

Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) was arguably the first British industrial designer, and this 1862 work was his most influential book. He worked in a variety of media, from wallpaper and textile design to metalwork and ceramics, but was also a botanist, and his two professorial roles in fine and ornamental arts, at the South Kensington Museum and the Crystal Palace, included the teaching of botany. Unlike William Morris, Dresser believed that good design could and should be mass-produced by industrial methods, so that it became affordable to all classes. He describes here how decorative ornament should be used in design, the importance of taking inspiration from natural (usually plant) models, and issues of proportion, balance and gradation. The book, which encouraged the rising middle classes to decorate their homes themselves, is highly illustrated: the colour plates can be viewed online at www.cambridge.org/9781108080408, by clicking on the 'Resources' button.