Modern Morris: introduction, blog 1

an approach to design

In our design conscious age, William Morris (1834-1896) remains as one of the only true Arts & Crafts Renaissance men. The British-born textile designer is known as a craftsman who took on dual roles of creator and theorist in a way that saw him become the father-figure of the international Arts & Crafts Movement for over thirty years. Morris’s theories influenced successors who produced (and continue to produce) designs oriented upon function in terms of human usage. His identity as a poet and a social agitator/propagandist informed his ideas and lectures, through which he exerted great influence in the realms of architecture, design planning, and printing. For Morris, art, poetry, architecture, social justice, and the making of things both useful and beautiful, were inseparable parts of a great whole. Given the distinct as most important figure in 20th century design, every aspect of Morris the designer was influenced by the awareness of the sacred balance between beauty and function.

In “Some Hints on Pattern Designing” (1881), Morris days “You may be sure that any decoration is futile, and has fallen into the at least the first stage of degradation, when it does not remind you of something beyond itself. ” Embracing the duality of nature as both abstract and familiar, Morris understood that, “Ornamental pattern work, to be raised above the contempt of reasonable men, must possess three qualities: beauty, imagination, and order.”