Designer Karim Rashid: ‘Adding Emotion and Meaning to a Flat World’

At Heimtexil, the international trade fair for home and contract textiles held in Frankfurt, Germany this January, designer Karim Rashid (karimrashid.com) partnered with HP “to bring the possibilities of digital printing to life” in the HP Lounge. Rashid designed a lounge where everything – floor, furniture, and walls – was custom printed using HP Latex print technologies.

“The world is becoming very visually savvy and info-savvy, and ornamentation is a modus operandi for communication, for providing dimension, texture, pattern, depth, and spirit; to embellish and add richness to surfaces and material and object,” says Rashid. “Today, it can add emotion and meaning to the flat world that modernism has created. The HP Heimtextil booth acts as a portal to the digital world. To highlight HP's digital printing capabilities, patterns are applied to a wide array of mediums. This creates an immersive and functional space without looking like a catalog.”

At the Heimtexil show, HP also announced a new HP digital printing solution for wallcoverings, designed to help print service providers and wallcovering manufacturers capture more of the growing custom décor market. The solution consists of a modular range of tools and supplies, including:
• The cloud-based HP WallArt Solution, which simplifies the design, visualization, and production of customized wallcoverings. It allows users to design wallcoverings themselves or work with customers online to produce customized wallcoverings.
• A wide range of compatible wall-decoration media from HP and its partners, including coated and uncoated, non-woven, vinyl, paper and PVC-free substrates..
• The HP Designjet L26500 and L28500 printer series, for printing proofs or for short runs directly to production media.
• The HP Scitex LX600 and LX850 industrial printers, which provide environmental certifications such as the GreenGuard Children & Schools Certification Program.
• Cutting solutions from Fotoba International.
• AVA design and file-preparation software, allowing designers to work easily with repeated patterns and improving color management with accurate screen-to-print color matching, accuracy between layers, and the ability to match digital prints to analog in a hybrid print environment.

KARIM RASHID
www.karimrashid.com

HP
www.hp.com