Glasgow-based design studio Timorous Beasties have collaborated with leather expert Bill Amberg on a collection of colourful digitally printed hides.

Known for their surreal textiles and wallpapers, Timorous Beasties was founded in 1990 by Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons. The two met while studying textile design at Glasgow School of Arts.

The series of hides also features collaborations between Amberg and Tom Dixon, Faye Toogood, Alexandra Champalimaud and Natasha Baradaran. Each designer has developed a special graphic for one skin.

Part of the Electroanalogue exhibition, these hides will be on display for the duration of London Design Festival 2018 at Tom Dixon's new King's Cross studio The Coal Office. The exhibition gathers together a series of digital innovations.

For the five square-metre cow hide, Timorous Beasties used one of their existing designs, Omni Drips.

"With the Omni Drips design there was a lot of mess and mucking about. We create all sorts of splats, dribbles, marbling using old inks and wallpaper cores destined for the recycling bin," explained co-founder Simmons.

"The results are scanned into the computer, cleaned up, and then put back together into a pattern and digitally printed."

The design was originally created in 2013, but has been tweaked for the printed leather version. The layers of scanned artwork create a pattern that is bursting with blotches and splatters of colour.

"I love the paradox of mounting chaos and order, in which pattern repeats and colours are elevated to new levels of richness and beauty; there is no way of printing as many colours than with digital technology," said Simmons.

Unlike many textile companies who have adopted digital technologies to reprint their archival designs, Timorous Beasties have always worked with a digital process from the inception of the idea.

"Digital technology has now come of age and has completely transformed our industry. One can print as many colours as one wishes or have huge repeats without tooling costs. The prototype has become the product," explained Simmons.

British designer Tom Dixon opened his new flagship store, showroom and offices inside a Victorian coal yard in London's King's Cross in April this year. The space will host the Electroanalogue exhibition during London Design Festival, which runs 15 to 23 September 2018.

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