West African Indigenous Design Patterns as a Source of Inspiration for Contemporary Ghanaian Textile Designs

The purpose of the study was to explore the possibility of generating contemporary Ghanaian textile designs from indigenous West African Design Patterns. Qualitative research design was adopted for the study. The data collection instrument was observation. Purposive sampling was used to select five (5) indigenous West African Design patterns which could be manipulated with CorelDraw to generate contemporary Ghanaian textile designs. The findings revealed that designs from selected indigenous textiles could be used as motifs and textures. Additionally the indigenous design patterns had aesthetically pleasing colour combinations that could be used in textile designing. The study concluded that indigenous design patterns from West Africa can be used to generate contemporary Ghanaian textile designs. It is recommended that textile designers in their quest to design should explore all possible or available themes, since there is a lot that can be derived from the unknown. Also other researchers (textile designers) should be encouraged to further investigate the possibility of generating contemporary textile designs from indigenous ones.

Keywords: Contemporary textile designs, Ghanaian, Indigenous Design Patterns, West Africa.