For those that know me well, you will understandably be surprised to hear I’ve been engaged lately in trend research. I have never been a dedicated follower of fashion and I oscillate between one of two camps; 1 – that the item I love and cannot live without is also so far out of my budget to be rational or 2 – it simply does not exist. This is why I’ve spent most of my life either making it myself or doing without. This is the girl that made everything for her own wedding!
Having said all that though – I’ve been having a ball with trend research. I’ve been taking a class called the The Sellable Sketch with the gorgeous Michelle (my latest girl crush) over at Pattern Observer. I won’t go into too much detail as I have another post in the works to tell you about it – suffice to say Michelle had us doing trend research. I am not one to shy away from research, after all it is a very large part of my day job. The course came with a 3 month subscription to Stylesight a trend and forecasting website that is an amazing resource for colour, graphic and textiles trends for apparel and furnishings. They publish Megatrends for seasons in the area you might be interested in – I was researching youth for a fabric collection aimed at boys 8 – 14. If you are ever in need of a little shot of inspiration and direction, this is the place to go. To keep all my ideas in one place I could not have done it without Evernote – my most favourite go to app. Have you used it?
The other site that I came to love in the process was the Color Collective. There are quite a few sites out there that create inspiring colour palettes but I just loved her wonderful mix of gorgeous imagery of food, prints and current trends. For me I sometimes struggle to find the perfect colour palette for my patterns and these provide a really good jumping off point.
There was one person in the class who didn’t like this process and thought it was a giant waste of time. I would really love to know what you think. Have you ever done trend research? Do you think it’s important for designers to be aware of forecasting?
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