Pattern / Surface Design

Artistic Tile / Michael Aram Collaboration - “Orchid”

“Gatsby”

“Canopy”

User Interaction

Carpet Grids / Customer Service Grids

Everyday our customer service department would be bombarded with calls from clients and designers asking for a PDF drawing of a certain pattern along with the dimensions of the tile carpet on a wall or floor. These requests would be transferred to the design department, where I would draw the elevation or plan with the given dimensions and mask a repeat of sheets, which are proportionate to the carpet size. These drawings would be exported to Illustrator, formatted, saved as PDFs, and sent to the client.

Requests would come in by the dozens and would sometimes pile up, causing the client to wait for the PDF for over a week. 

I believed that there was an easier solution to quickly providing the designers with the information they needed and removing myself from the process. My first thought was to learn Rhinoscript and create a macro script that would accept the dimensions of a carpet, find the established center point of the carpet, trim the tile sheets, and export the drawings to Illustrator. This seemed to be a tedious solution but a solution nonetheless. This difficult solution helped me break down the problem into specific points which would need to be addressed. The simplest solutions to problems do not always pop out right away.

Illustrator was a tool which bridges Rhino and a PDF, which is essentially a digital piece of paper with some information. If the pre-masked, repeated tiles were laid out on the PDF, all that would be needed to allow the designer to add their own information (carpet dimensions) is a grid proportional to the tile sheets. 

This solution freed up the design department from having to draw any carpets which would fit in a 60" H x 100" W or 100" H x 60" W area. The customer service staff were able to email the Carpet Grids to their designers and explain how they worked, allowing the designers to make quick decisions on site.

Below is the Carpet Grid Tutorial, presented to the Artistic Tile customer service, sales associates, and any outside designers interested in the project.

Photo Boards

Artistic Tile distributes to over 150 different stores within the US. To keep them all up to date with our new inventory, we send out large 20" x 20"  physical stone samples. These samples can be very costly if there are many new patterns developed at once.

The design department had created a tool which would be significantly less expensive and easily replaced. The Photo Boards are 20" x 20" printed and laminated samples, which cost a tenth of the cost of a physical stone sample. The Photo Boards allow us to print a full scale stylized image of the tile pattern, along with different colorways and measurements listed on the back.

Other Projects