NATIONAL POST ARTS

Retail Therapy: Parkdale Wallpaper’s Hot Type
Oh, how the font nerds are gonna love Parkdale Wallpaper Co.! The new line of wall coverings is designed from a typographic perspective and débuts during Toronto Design Week’s Radiant Dark: The Devil is in the Details exhibition this weekend (from $10 per square foot, printed on demand in any custom colour combination, available in standard 27” x 15’ rolls, parkdalewallpaper.ca). 

“I wanted to ground it where I live, and that’s Parkdale,” the collection’s graphic designer and creator Zab Hobart explains. “And there is so much great late Victorian architecture here, and since wallpaper was having a heyday in that era, and was a massive cacophony of pattern, it seemed a natural fit.” Hobart, as the principal of Toronto’s Zab Design & Typography, is an award-winning book designer (she has over a dozen Alcuin Society citations) who also teaches typography at OCAD and York’s Sheridan school. “I think it’s a natural progression from designing endpapers for books,” she says, “if you think about William Morris, who was a printmaker for books. It’s an extension of making patterns.”