When Light Peeks Through

One of the emphasis in design I really would love to get into is lighting. I stumbled upon these laser cut lampshades in a design blog I check daily. The form of these lampshades are cylindrical but the content is what blows my mind. Along the sides are laser cut patterns or images that illuminate once its dark enough to turn on. This type of lampshade tends to mainly light the upper and lower portions around the lamp, but maybe its because of what Deiter Rams had said about what good design is: “Good design is minimal design.”

What I also recognized is that when it is too bright out and there is no need to turn on the light, depending on the color of the lampshade, the laser cut design appears darker than the lamp itself, creating a contrasting pattern against the material. Sure there's very little positive space when its too bright to light the lamp, but the positive space is enough to see a pattern against all the negative areas. The focal points of the lampshade are the laser cut designs themselves. The different representational and abstract patterns guide you through the whole lampshade, not only when the light is on. Some of the representational designs were of owls or butterflies.

Going deeper, past one of my favorite blogs, and into the Stellavie website, you can find many more of their work, and each one is more mind blowing than the next. If you click on the Products tab up top, you can find many more of their designs. From what I see, this company plays with form and content, repetition, and maybe even monochromatic colors from the different tints and shades of light these designs are illuminated into, especially on the sizes of the lamp if you' were to look at it from the sides. The way some of these repetitive designs have to be cut, you can sense a psychic line made that is needed in order to make these patterns work.

I think these lampshades are a great way to present what future lampshades should look like or they should at least start thinking about the direction lampshades could be headed.

http://www.contemporist.com/2010/10/30/lasercut-lampshades-by-stellavie/#more-22143
http://www.stellavie.com/home/en/