Day: July 29, 2020

I started hearing about lookbooks in second year, when first year students in textiles were doing them, I knew vaguely what it was but never really thought about making my own. It seems like quite a daunting task, a large book showcasing all my patterns and mockups, but also something that could be interesting to keep and put on my website to show others how my graduate collection came together.

I decided I wanted my lookbook to show me as a designer, and sell the unique aspect of my collection, being about the declining UK species. I decided to explore a couple of lookbooks in terms of layouts too to see what kind of thing I need to do.

Unfortunately the lookbooks that I have found online will not embed here, I tried surface pattern lookbooks as I thought fashion ones were a little different. The first one I came across was quite an attractive collection of print designs for fashion I believe it was, the layout I would say was very simple, but effective, usually one or two images to a double page, and mostly full of mockups that really showed the patterns, although for my lookbook, I do not think this will work. The pattern collection is large and including some variations on the placements and colourways on the secondary and blenders to show, there is a large number of patterns in the collection to fit into a book, and I would not want this to be so large that it would be boring to flick through. I want to come up with layouts that are interesting enough with two, three, even four designs to a page. I think the flat patterns will work well showing the collections grouped together, and also the mockups grouped together afterwards, as some could contain patterns from a mix of collections.

I found some examples of different types of lookbooks, from photography and products, to fashion in both men and women styles. Above shows quite a quirky fashion example, including words. I really like the idea of the faded coloured boxes, these could be used great for adding text and showing a separation between the four mini collections too, which I think is important. If you were to randomly flick to a page in it, you could notice the background colour, and then easily see the hero page also has that colour on the background.

I think ideally I would like to explore some typography tutorials too as I think this could be helpful to me, surface pattern design is not just pretty textiles, it is a graphic design and sometimes this will include more graphic elements, such as typography, layouts and lookbooks. Skillshare offers a range of tutorials so I will probably have a look on there, my last one I watched told me about contrasting fonts, using a bold, graphic design firstly for headings and titles, then a smaller, plainer font to contrast this which I think is really important to give it that professional look.

Using faded designs and backgrounds I think is great for adding an effective bit of branding and style into it, this is something I have seen on the more quirky lookbooks that are not just plain images and maybe a caption.

I love this lookbook for the dark contrast with the white, I think this is really important to have contrast, and I think I will try and take this away, even if it is using dark text against white or faded backgrounds. I also like how they were able to get a range of images on each page, so this being an A4 lookbook, the pages will actually be quite big and I think this will be good for viewing the patterns and not forcing them to be as big as they could be, making them fit nicer with the pages.

So I think my next step is to start planning out the lookbook on paper, knowing exactly what I want to get on each page in what order especially, then maybe sketch out some layouts that make sense and I think just get into doing it and trying things out to see what they look like.

After my critical look at the pattern boards I created from my designs, I had a chance to evaluate them and realised what I wanted to change, whether it was as simple as a colourway or scale, but also noticing too many similarities sometimes and changing it up with something a little different.

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So the left one is the old board, and the right is the newer version. These actually look very similar because I was quite happy with the designs that I was producing and putting together here, but I did notice a few things. The placement design was correct for this board, but I changed the size of the dots behind the dormouse which is more consistent now with the other animals in this placement style, I think this does look better for the front of a notebook or cushion like I wanted.

The secondaries I thought had a good background colour spread, but they were all showing mushrooms. I changed one of these to a berry design, and then changed the colourway of the bottom pattern to avoid too much pink. I thin the design at the bottom works well for both pink and green so I will put both colourways into my lookbook. Finally I looked closely at scale for the blenders and I think it has made more of a difference, I think it changes it from a busy pattern to more of a texture sometimes, which makes it look much more like a blender.

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Again older board on the left, and newer on the right. I decided to put a different type of placement design on each board, so the hare represents the bottom corner placement. The middle placement from the first board will be shown as a variation of the middle placement, on the dormouse placement page in my lookbook. I looked at scale on my secondaries, showing more of the hares and brought the scale of the ferns up a little. With the blenders, I have brought the mushroom one down in scale, and I just did not like the leaf repeat, so I created a new one, that was more sparse and spread out.

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The old design on the left has a number of designs on it, I think my hedgehog collection was the biggest and had a lot of different designs that I did not use and edited down too. The right shows the updated board, using the top corner placement and the green hero. I swapped the bottom secondary on the old board to a smaller scale and made it a blender instead, which I think works because of its scale and the two colours. I added a berry design as the secondaries were populated by leaves, a similar problem to the Dormouse having all the secondaries as mushrooms. I changed the colourway of the top blender to avoid a majority pink background collection with the blenders. I also adjusted the scales on the linear leaves and the new sycamore blender from the secondary column previously.

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The old board on the left here shows the middle placement which will now be shown with the dormouse placement as that is the board the placement style is represented on, for this one I switched to the header design, which I think is quite dynamic for the squirrel as they symmetrically jump away from each other with their nuts. This allowed me to show a little more of the heroes here. I liked my top two secondaries, the middle one has a lot of variation on colourways and alternatives too. I did not like the bottom secondary design, I just did not love it and noticed all three of the secondary were tossed. So I decided to swap this with this new linear design with the yellow foliage. I adjusted the scales on the top two blenders here and replaced the third one as I just did not like it, I think there were too many colours in it for the blender, so I swapped it with this simple nuts repeat which works well with the theme.

Overall I think these are far better designs now and work well as collections, I am excited to get started on the lookbook and put these together in a more professional context.