Multidisciplinary designer, Josh Itiola, shares the story of how finding refuge in creativity & painting became our Kaleido Textiles.

Josh Itiola's sketches.

The story of this collection begins with a spark of creativity during the uncertain summer of 2020. With the pandemic raging around the world, I was looking for refuge in a creative outlet. Having always been drawn to the balance and rhythm of lines within patterns, I found inspiration in architectural drawings.

Beginnings of Josh's distorted checkered painting.

The initial design concept came from a manipulation of the popular checkered pattern. I experimented with three shapes - a simple square, a right-angle triangle with a concave hypotenuse, and a sector of a circle. These shapes were created from a curved cut through a square, and with these three shapes, I was able to create a new variation of the checkered pattern.


Josh's nearly finished paintings.

I first applied this pattern to a series of paintings and screen prints, which looked really amazing and were well-received. Working alongside Areaware, we applied the pattern to napkins and tea towels, creating a stunning and unique design that is both functional and visually appealing. The napkins used the original design I created in 2020. The tea towel was a practice of rearranging the three shapes I came up with to create a new pattern. They both are a perfect example of my love for the balance and rhythm of lines within patterns.