When Barker Creek’s founder, Carolyn Hurst, approached me about creating new product lines for their company, I jumped at the opportunity. Barker Creek creates and sells school and office supplies to big box stores and specialty retailers, as well as selling online, so their products have the benefit – and the unique challenges – of needing to appeal to a wide range of demographics.
For this line, I created patterns that were particularly bright and playful, as we’d be producing items like task charts and bulletin board trim to be used in primary school classrooms, in addition to more standard office stationery products like name tags and file folders. We landed on the theme of “Stellar” for the line, and I opted for a palette anchored with cool turquoise and purple to evoke space and galaxies accented by bright, warm orange and yellow to evoke planets like the sun and Saturn.
Unfortunately, the pandemic put a hold on purchasing and production of classroom and office supplies (and most in-school and in-office attendance.) While these items haven’t yet been sold in retail outlets, the following images show what they’d look like if they were.
