The founders of New York magazine Sight Unseen have used a basic, web-based design software tool to produce a pair of two-tone rugs for Swedish brand Kasthall, previewing at Stockholm Design Week.
Sight Unseen founders Jill Singer and Monica Khemserov are not trained as designers, so they restricted themselves to the Rug Designer tool – a process used by everyday customers visiting Kasthall's website – to create their designs.
They produced a hand-tufted circular rug in pink and green, and a rectangular hand-woven flat-weave rug in pink and yellow stripes.
"We aren't trained designers so we don't have a typical process, so in that way the web design tool was really fantastic for us," said co-founder Jill Singer.
"It gave us the capacity to flex our creativity but within a set framework. Of course there are things we might have tweaked if not for the tool, but it gave us a welcome sense of control," she told Dezeen.
The 120-year old Swedish rug company has launched an updated version of its Rug Designer tool to coincide with Stockholm Design Week. It allows for hand-tufted or hand-woven rugs, in a choice of 116 colours.
These can be applied in solid blocks or used to create geometric patterns, to create a bespoke floor covering that matches an interior.
The design of both rugs by Sight Unseen play with decorative lines, as well as using the bold colours typical of the studio's work.
"Sight Unseen is all about how to use colour in a chic but un-boring way — we like to create exciting, unique colour combinations, often using tonal variations or strong contrasts," said Singer.
Bands of blush and dusky rose stripes cross the mustard and ochre-striped ground of the rectangular rug and thin vertical stripes on the green half of the round rug run perpendicular to equally spaced horizontal strips on the pink sector.
"We wanted to mix up the stripes a little so they didn't feel so traditional, hence turning them in two different directions in the hand-tufted version," explained Sight Unseen co-founder Monica Khemsurov.
"But at the same time, we didn't get too playful, as we prefer design that's more sophisticated."
The rugs are on show at the Kasthall showroom throughout Stockholm Design Week, which runs from 4 to 10 February in various locations around the city.