Have you ever wondered if you should be creating one off/stand alone design or collections of designs?

Stand alone design versus collections

A stand alone design is a one off design, so you haven’t created it to go with other designs or as part of a collection. On the other hand, a collection of designs is a group of designs that have been created to coordinate together and be very cohesive as a group.

Which is better?

So, which should you do and which is better?

You can actually do both and it will depend on the brief you’re given and your reason for creating the design, but there are a couple of benefits of creating designs in collections as opposed to just one off designs. First of all, when you begin designing, you’ll have your design ideas and your mood board that you’re going to use to start creating and developing your ideas. Once you’ve created your mood board, creating more than one design using it is easier than having to create multiple mood boards or develop multiple ideas for different designs. So that’s the first benefit of using working in collections.

The other benefit of working in collections is that you’re creating a group of designs that goes together cohesively. This means, when you present your designs to a client, you have the opportunity to sell more than one design from that collection to that client. So for example, if your client was buying your design to use on a product within their store they will often want to have a group of products that work together cohesively and look really beautiful together when sitting side by side. Or for example, if you had a client that was purchasing, a design for a bed linen range, they might want a design to go on the front of the quilt, cover, a different design on the back, and a different design on the cushions so they could potentially purchase more than one of your designs.

Presenting cohesive designs

The other thing that you want to think about is even if you aren’t working in collections when you are presenting your designs to clients, you do want to think about how you’re presenting your design so that you’re making sure that they do look cohesive as a group. So if you want to present a range of your designs to a client, even if the designs weren’t created as a collection of designs, you still want to make sure that they look good and work well together when you present them.