=47. Designers for Calico Prints.= This employment is well adapted to women. It requires taste and ingenuity. Its labors are light, but rather confining. A person of lively fancy and nice powers of discrimination succeeds best. The gay, rich, dark colors of winter clothing are not suitable for summer; nor are the light, delicate ones of summer suitable for winter clothing. This inviting field of labor, now that it is unbarred to woman, we hope will be well improved. Let her enter, and she will find sufficient to "reward a careful gleaner with a valuable sheaf or two." We do not speak of inventing and preparing designs for calico prints particularly, but of the general field for designers. Some proprietors engage a designer (here and there a lady) to stay at their establishments, and devote all their time to the preparing of designs--paying a fixed salary for the month, year, or any time specified. Some adopt the same plan in wall-paper establishments. The price generally paid for a design pattern for calicoes is from $1 to $3.
=48. Designers for Wall Paper.= One of the most important branches of designing is that of preparing patterns for wall paper, fire screens, &c. In the report of the Philadelphia School of Design it is stated that one of the ladies of that school received $60 for a design some time ago. They seldom bring that much, and all designs prepared will not sell. The usual price for a good hall design is from $12 to $20; and of paper for a room, from $12 to $16. We fear it will be long before the beautiful designs of the French are equalled by Americans. Their taste must be more highly cultivated before such is the case. Mr. C., of New York, employs a designer (Frenchman), paying him $1,000 a year, who receives in another manufactory a salary of $3,000 a year. N. C. & Co. get some of their patterns from the school of design in Paris, because the French have more taste in designing, or, rather, that taste has been more cultivated. Brande gives the merits of designing as follows: "Every work of design is to be considered either in relation to the art that produced it, to the nature of its adaptation to the end sought, or to the nature of the end it is destined to serve; thus its beauty is dependent on the wisdom or excellence displayed in the design, in the fitness or propriety of the adaptation, and upon the utility of the end."