When you design a bag, often the first thing you have to worry is about is the shape of the bag. Historically we’ve seen many geometrical shapes like a square, rectangular, or trapezoidal shapes. But lately, we’ve also seen many other shapes. What about the circle bag, the bucket bags, or even the ‘I smuggle a basketball with me’-ball bags.
My next client-bag-request asked for a little research. So today I want to discuss a little about geometrical shapes and how they can be our inspiration for (who knows) the next trend!
2-dimensional geometric shapes
Since we can’t do much with 1-dimensional shapes, I continue to the 2D shapes. It might sound like a trip down memory lane, back to kindergarten but try to think of bag concepts. Try to imagine it how you can use these shapes, just as they are or combined in your next design.
Two-dimensional shapes we know as bag are, the square, the rectangle, and the circle. Little less known geometrical bag shapes but also very common is the trapezoidal, the oval, and the pentagon shape for bags. The latter one is often used with the upper corner fold over as the flap.
Less used shapes are the triangle, hexagon (and with more corners from octa-, nona-, deca-gon etc.). Though combinations of all these shapes are seen. The corners of the flaps of the bag are often shaped like the latterly mentioned shapes. The envelope bag is a clear triangle, and other cutoff corners can be linked to a half hexagon shape.
3 – dimensional geometrical shapes
All of these 2-dimensional shapes can be made in a 3D bag by adding a little strip of leather between two of the same shapes. A circle becomes a cylinder, a triangle becomes a triangular prism and a rectangle a cuboid. Although of most of these shapes there is also the possibility to create a 3D version of the shape itself. My personal favorite would be a perfect little (3D square –>) cube as a bag. Although a leather pyramid, ball, or diamond (Made one of these as a paper press in this post!) could be interesting as well.
If we go one step further, we can combine the three the shapes as well. Apparently
This post is not meant to learn you all about the geometrical shapes, and how they are named but to learn you to look at things differently. How could you use shapes in your next design? Look around, try to identify shapes and as I already told in this post, inspiration is everywhere around you! All you have to do is look and recognize the beauty.
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