Why design development is important for your pattern designs?

Design development is an essential stage in the design process. It is where you use the inspiration and mood board you collected (you can find out more about doing that here and here) and use it to start creating your design elements and developing your design ideas.

What I’ve found in my experience of teaching students face to face is a lot of people are really reluctant to want to go through this process. They often want to just jump straight into designing without having done all of the development work beforehand. What inevitably happens is their work doesn’t end up well resolved, and their designs just don’t end up as good as they could. So I really encourage you to really think about this process and really explore and experiment during this process so that you can come up with some beautifully well-resolved designs.

The process is really simple. It’s just using the inspiration that you’ve created to start developing lots of ideas and the ideas can be as wide and varied as you like. And you really want to be as experimental as you can in this process, because the more ideas you have, the better it’s going to be for you when you start developing your designs. I highly recommend you use this phase to just really explore and experiment and come up with as many ideas as you can.

I really want to encourage you at this point to think about developing more ideas, rather than less. It’s better to have more elements to choose from and discarding some rather than having less and not enough to work with. For example, if you are creating a design based on roses instead of just drawing one rose but doing multiple different versions. Even if it’s quite a similar-looking rose, just simply by doing the process of drawing it more than once you will develop a slightly shaped flower e.g. maybe the petals are slightly different shaped or slightly different sizes, etc. Then when you put your pattern together, you will have more depth and interest in your design because you’re not just trying to repeat the same elements out over and over again within that one design.

Listen to find out more about the design development process in this podcast episode.

You can download my Pattern Design Secrets eBook here