Kate Whitley
47 // Kate Whitley attended Mississippi State University in the USA and received a BFA in Graphic Design. She is now based in Nashville, Tennessee. Kate loves anything related to folk art and studies designs and motifs from American Pennsylvania Dutch and Fraktur, as well as those from Scandinavia, Russia and Uzbekistan. She collects quilting books and anything mid-century, and finds inspiration in vintage album covers from the 1940s–60s. Kate has a large collection of vintage silk scarves; having taught herself how to paint on silk, she created her own hand- painted designs. She would love to design a series of scarves for Anthropologie or Target, and to create an affordable fabric line. In 2012 Kate was named one of the 16 Young Creatives to Watch by HOW magazine.
Design Heroes: Alexander Girard, Vera Neumann
Tremolo
Short bands of irregular stripes and squares are stacked in different directions like books on a shelf.
Allegretto
Rectangles drift away in fragments from the centre of this composition.
Allegro
All the designs shown as calendar pages are taken from Kate’s 2013 Sunshine Calendar, in which her aim was to represent 365 days of sunshine. Bars create a stylized sunburst design for the month of July.
Brioso
In this design, Kate has depicted the sun in irregular rings of warm overlapping colours.
Grandioso
Mosaic-style squares like crazy paving are spread around a simple round yellow sun.
Decrescendo
Irregular rounds increase in size as they move down the page, making a neat device in which to contain the typography of the calendar dates.
Bravura
Pebble-like shapes are scattered across the top of the calendar page. Using transparency creates extra shades and colours.
Fortissimo
Here mosaic-like fragments radiate out from a central dot representing the hot summer sun.
Con Forza
December features a strong graphic image of stylized sun rays.
Presto
Geometric fragments drift in front of the sun like a summer haze.