Ornamental design
Ornamental design is a late nineteenth-century London pattern manual by the designer Lewis F. Day, published by B. T. Batsford in 1890 as a reference for decorators and craftsmen. Its numbered plates show dense black-and-white surface patterns: interlaced foliage, scrolled acanthus panels, repeating daisy-like blooms, and a German plate of symmetrically disposed creatures amid scrolls. A designer could take from them the balance of positive and negative areas and the way motifs fill a rectangle edge to edge.
