Then & Now - 70s wallpaper!

The more I think about the seventies, the more I reduce it to a nasty colour palette combined with repeating geometric shapes. I guess my earliest memories are of crawling around on hideous carpets, whereby I was practically engulfed by these clashes of predominantly brown, yellow and orange. There is something sinister about them, yet I feel very nostalgic for them at the same time. I decided to play around with these forms in Illustrator for a while...

I think these patterns would look great screenprinted. I would like to do them as A1 or A2 posters, maybe with some secondary text elements on them, like this:

I've used HelveticaNeue Ultralight for the "Then & Now" and the oft-mocked but very seventies Hobo for the year. I will need to play around a bit to get it right - with so few elements they simply have to be spot on.

And I just had a brainwave regarding the "big" and "small" outcomes... how about printing one of these patterns on a roll and papering a wall in the exhibition space? Steve said he can print up to five metres on a roll (although it will probably have to be from a PDF as Photoshop/Illustrator won't let you create artwork beyond about 2.5 metres apparently). If I measure the floor-ceiling height of the exhibition space I can get a few rolls printed out. That's the big outcome, perhaps for the small one I can screenprint a poster to go alongside, with the name and year details, as above.

Okay, so that was "Then", what about "Now"? In terms of wallpaper, these days people are going for pretty extravagant designs but then only applying them to a feature wall. For the poster I could divide the space, maybe in faux 3D and add the modern pattern to just one area. That might work. Not sure what I will do for the big outcome. I will also have to think about a suitable typeface that says "Now".