A Look Behind the Seams at the Butter & Piglet Design Challenge

Come take a peek behind the curtain of our Spoonflower x East Fork partnership! To get a more holistic view of the Butter & Piglet Design Challenge (inspired by East Fork’s Spring ’23 glaze colors) we’re sitting down with Spoonflower artist Sophia Adalaine to see how she created her winning design. We’ll also hear from East Fork’s Sr. Manager of Partnerships Catherine Campbell to learn how they selected a challenge winner from among the top 50 community-voted entries. Fill your East Fork mug, have a seat and settle in; we’re happy that you’re here. 

Yes, quite new! I typically design with bold and vibrant colors, so it was a great change of pace to work in the softer Butter & Piglet palette.

It was helpful that the challenge strongly recommended a limited and simple color palette so that Butter (hex code #F4EDBA) and Piglet (hex code #F2DDDD) could be the stars of the show. I thought white would be a nice neutral to emphasize the palette’s lightness and provide enough contrast for both colors to show up. For palettes like this one, where two colors have a similar brightness, I find spacing out the design elements gives them all breathing room and visibility. It can also play up the light, airy feel.  

I liked that East Fork names their glazes, so I started my inspiration there. My first literal interpretation was: what if I did something with piglets and sticks of butter? But I thought the ideas I came up with were too heavy-handed an approach for colors so delicate. Since these are East Fork’s seasonal spring colors, I thought I could explore something that gives spring vibes instead. 

Spring is the return of life from a sleepy winter—flowers emerge to cheer up the landscape, animals have their young and grow their families. I kept the piglets from my initial instinct and started thinking of the flowers in my garden. I remembered my buttercups and thought this would be a great way to incorporate the Butter part of the palette while adding some whimsical wordplay (I’m an avid appreciator of alliteration and playing with your words!).  

I tried to keep East Fork’s aesthetic and pottery always simmering in the back of my mind through my whole process. For example, the challenge said that black and white are neutrals that could be included in a simple color palette. I could have used black to achieve the color contrast I needed, but I felt white would be better suited because it would lend to an airy, light-hearted design. 

When exploring East Fork’s website and ceramic collections, I got a sense of something earthy yet classy—maybe something like a chic farmhouse, or a farm-to-table restaurant that respects what comes from the earth and elevates it. Therefore, I wanted to create a design that would complement the East Fork pottery placed on or near it and allow their tableware to stand out while also offering a chic yet down-to-earth background. 

I felt simple piglet silhouettes would be better suited than if I tried to do more illustrative pigs and entertained the idea of adding teacups because I thought teacup pigs at teatime might be a fun idea. So I doodled these thoughts so I wouldn’t forget them, then headed over to my computer to make it come to life in Adobe® Illustrator®. 

While applying Butter & Piglet to design elements, I found the two colors weren’t contrasting enough when directly adjacent. I needed some breathing space and thought literal white space could help. In addition to flowers being around the piglets, I also wanted them in their silhouettes because my pattern looked like large patches of pink otherwise. I incorporated white daisies for contrast and because their petal structure complements buttercup flowers. I ended up abandoning the teacup idea because I thought a simple, cohesive idea of “piglets in the flower field” would make a stronger design concept. 

In the design-making process, I created my motif elements (several versions of piglets and flowers) and set them to the side of my art board in Illustrator. Then I played with several compositions and nudged things around for hours until the layout looked balanced and “right” to me. That’s when I made sure to walk away from the design for a couple days—things start to look strange when you stare at them too long! When I came back to my design and it still felt right, I knew that’s as good as I was going to get it and wrapped up my file for printing!

Soft color palettes like this one aren’t what I typically work with, even though I like them a lot! Creating something with this palette gave me practice and experience I was hoping would happen, though I guess that wasn’t truly unexpected. What I didn’t expect though, was how much I enjoyed my design at the end! Getting better at surface pattern design is a goal I’ve set for this year, and I also think I’m quite critical of my art and myself, so I felt surprisingly pleased with my piece. I think self confidence in this design skill I’m building was the most unexpected thing I learned. 

From the very beginning of East Fork, the idea of community—hearing from a community, building community, supporting communities—has been at the heart of the business. I don’t think businesses should operate like a one-way conversation. When we get to meet other people outside East Fork, we get to learn what is possible within East Fork: how we can be better and do better and push our own creative aspirations.  

To partner with Spoonflower, where we’re able to meet a huge community of artists and have them tell East Fork stories in their own visual way, and to watch those stories come to life in homes on tabletops and throw pillows and blankets—there’s real joy in that. And joy is something we need more of these days, I think.  

I worked with Nicole Lissenden, East Fork’s Head of Design, to consider the Piglet & Butter entries we were selecting from, a pool of the top 50 community-voted designs. We narrowed them down to a list of 10, and then our marketing team gathered together to go through them and pick the grand-prize winner. We aimed to select a variety of designs, then looked closely at each design’s use of color, detail, perspective and movement in the art. Any specific nods to East Fork were fun (thank you Mug-loving Spoonflower artists out there!) but not necessarily an advantage over any other artist’s design. We voted on the designs and got into some heated tie-breakers! We were really impressed with the quality of designs that were submitted overall.  

Sophia Adalaine’s Piglets In the Flower Field design felt whimsical but still held a maturity within the design. The fun element of precise floral cutouts juxtaposed with the piglets gave it something that would catch the eye, inviting someone to look closer. The spacing and different positions of the pigs gave it movement. The team felt it was simply “fresh,” an embodiment of the spring season!