Recently, I rediscovered a book I bought when I was in first grade of art school. It made me think of the times we had to discover patterns and inspiration from that book as students. Now, so many years later, the plates are still incredibly rich and the book is a very good inspiring tool for graphic design also. If you look for patterns, for (irregular) shapes, for logo inspiration, poster inspiration, etc.. Even for a webdesigner, you can find lots of inspiration from the book to make bullets, header shapes and so on.

I'll post some pictures from the book, but the book contains 100 high quality plates.

Title of the book and author

Here are the book details:

• The title of the book is: ART FORMS IN NATURE (also known as Kunstformen)
• author is Ernst Haeckel
• ISBN number: 0-486-22987-4

The bookcover

The plates

Discover on your own

I made this bookcover as an example and out of 1 shape I did the flower shape using the pen tool in Illustrator. I made a symbol of the shape and used the transform tool to copy the shape horizontally and vertically.