Why Adobe Illustrator?
- Quick to learn
- Cheaper than Fashion CAD
- Large user base
- Industry standard fashion drawing software
- A wealth of resources, including those in the public domain
- Enhances, rather than restricts, designers' creativity
Why not Fashion CAD?
CAD (Computer Aided Design) has been used in the apparel industry for many years and has evolved over time to cover many different aspects of the garment design and development process.
However, traditional 2D CAD systems designed specifically for the fashion industry are not only expensive but tend to have a steep learning curve and usually require some degree of technical proficiency. This makes apparel specific CAD impractical and often tends to alienate users, especially the design community, as the systems tend to be more technical and less creative.
There are many benefits to using CAD over producing fashion flats by hand with pen or pencil. Hand-drawn flats are perfect for free-style designing and getting across the “feel” or “look” but they are often inappropriate for use as technical instructions for the factory. They can lack detail, cannot be enlarged and can easily be misinterpreted (think about movement lines being mistaken for seams!), which can lead to costly mistakes in sampling and delays in getting styles to market on time – essential for a trend-led industry. Pen/pencil drawings are also time-consuming as they cannot be easily edited, components reused or quickly coloured.
Adobe® Illustrator® for fashion
Adobe® Illustrator® is the perfect solution to combat the downsides of typical apparel CAD systems, whilst still achieving all the benefits. It’s considerably less expensive so, unlike apparel CAD systems, which may only be deployed for a small number of key users in a business, Adobe® Illustrator® is a viable option to roll out across full departments.
Also unlike the CAD systems, Illustrator® lends itself to creativity. Rather than making Designers feel like “computer operators”, if trained correctly, Illustrator® just becomes another artistic medium, an extension of the pencil.
As Illustrator® can be used both “technically” and “creatively” it is quick and easy to produce both detailed technical drawings for the factory and perfect coloured drawings for collection books and sales materials. The fact that Illustrator® is not specifically designed with fashion in mind is not important because all the generic tools in Illustrator® can be easily adapted to make drawing fashion, fast and efficient.
All that’s required is the right training.
