Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Martata

Story by Martata

Published on Oct 06, 2011 in Shop

Photo by nellianna

Martata

Hoi! Let me introduce myself: I’m Marta and I work for the Dutch Etsy community. I love supporting my local artisans and highlighting the great work coming out of the Netherlands. Today I’m proud to announce that October’s Etsy Twitter background was dreamed up by industrial designer Kenneth Veenenbos and architect Nelliana van den Baard, who can usually be found collaborating on paper lamps in their Etsy shop, Snowpuppe. They stepped outside their comfort zone and designed our Twitter background to celebrate Dutch Design Week, an annual summit of visual leaders, including Etsy’s own Creative Director. Kenneth and Nelliana were more than happy to answer some questions about their inspiration for this month’s bold design.

How was designing for the Twitter Artist Series different from your lamps?
It was a lot of fun to work with geometric patterns in 2D. We call our graphic “Lost in Geometry” and it’s based on one of our lampshade patterns. We do have dreams of combining graphics with our lampshades so this might be a good starting point.

Tell us a little bit about your design.
“Lost in Geometry” tells the story of the road to your dreams, just like The Wizard of Oz. In our graphic it is Snowpuppe (the snowman) who is looking for something. He is lost in the valleys and mountains of the folded paper and is walking on his own yellow brick road. Snowpuppe hopes to find the right direction, just like we do.

Where do you normally get your inspiration from when designing your lamps?
We derive a lot of inspiration from the the sentence, “It seems to be impossible.”
Other forms of inspiration: Jumping off a swing, finishing a puzzle upside down, eating cheese with chocolate, the movie Jonathan Livingston Seagull, an umbrella that doesn’t break during heavy storms and mega-large origami lampshades.

The architect Jorn Utzon liked to say, “I like to be on the edge of the possible.” Most of our process is related to a serires of trial and error. If you’re not afraid to do something wrong you will eventually learn what is right. Coincidence is an important factor in our creative process.

What’s next for you two?
We are figuring out whether we are a lightstudio from the Netherlands specializing in paper or a paperstudio specializing in lampshades. We see a yellow brick road in front of us that will take us to many exciting adventures in paper engineering. Also, we are planning to use our leftover paper scraps for new ideas — perhaps we can make something for our little nephew, or he can just use it as drawing paper.

Free Desktop + Mobile Wallpaper!

Download for iPhone / iPod Touch
Download for iPhone 4
Download for iPad
Download for 1280×800 Desktop
Download for 1440×900 Desktop
Download for 1680×1050 Desktop
Download for 1920×1200 Desktop

Instructions:
1. Pick your device above and save the image to your computer.
2. Sync your device and click the photo tab to include your pretty new wallpaper.
3. After syncing, view the photo and click the lower left button to use as wallpaper.
4. That’s it! Now show off and tell all your tweeps to follow @Etsy, @EtsyFR, @EtsyUK,@EtsyDE, @EtsyNL, @EtsyAU and @EtsyJP.

Get Caught Up With Etsy’s Twitter Artist Series

Discuss: 45 comments

Seller's Items

45 comments

Sign in to add your own