For the first time in my life, I’m excited about school?!
Yes, I have been taking a continuing education course from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design). The course is called Surface Pattern Design: from Concept to Market. It’s more or less a “step 2” class from a traditional surface pattern design class. It’s designed for folks who know how to make patterns but want to learn more about licensing patterns, designing collections, and forecasting trends. You could call this the “business side” of surface pattern design!
Our major assignment in this course is to design a collection. Why does designing in collections matter? I’m sure the reasons differ by industry, but essentially you want to be able to offer a lot of different patterns that can fit together in the same space. It’s not necessarily about “matching,” but rather evoking a similar theme, feeling, and color palette. This makes you more marketable as a designer if you work in collections. For example, if you’re targeting the home interiors space, it makes sense to offer different patterns that may appear in a bedroom (bedding, curtains, rug, etc.). Or say stationery - you want to offer 5 different designs that will go well together in a greeting card pack that will appear on gift shop shelves. The cool thing about licensing patterns is that the opportunities are really endless. Patterns appear everywhere in our world so there are so many different companies to partner with. Crossing my fingers for a licensing deal one day!
I completed two small pattern collections in this course. The first was a monochromatic collection inspired by cherry blossoms.
This class started in the midst of cherry blossoms blooming and I couldn't help but capture them in my first ever collection. I ended up sticking to a very monochrome palette, which I'd soon realize wasn't the best for collection building.
In my final collection, I used a painting to anchor the collection, and had two patterns accompany it.
As you can probably tell, my skills drastically improved in my final collection. I had felt limited with the monochromatic style, and while I do tend to like a limited palette, I found it was really hard to create differentiating patterns with so few colors to work with. So I went alllll out in my final collection.
We were also tasked with putting our patterns into “sell sheets,” which are essentially one pagers showing you all the patterns, their relative scales and the color palette. Ideally a buyer will look at these sell sheets to get an overview of the collection, and can picture these patterns on their products. For practical purposes, you could picture these patterns being on fabric, wallpaper, stationery… really anything!
I will quickly brag about my final collection, of which I received this feedback from my instructor: “The new collection is so pretty! It's such a nice mix of layouts and predominant colors. It feels simultaneously classic and updated. I would say that the palette really makes it feel modern. I think this group is really well conceived and don't have any design related suggestions. You really brought it to a great place!” I am such a teacher’s pet, so naturally I’m grinning.
What do you think about these collections? Drop a comment below!
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