My Design Development Process So Far - My MA Project

For me I'm a much more practical person than I am written, although I can explain myself pretty well on paper and like to think I know what I'm talking about, I'm a lot more confident when it comes to putting pen to paper in the form of designing. For me, this was one of the main reasons I continued my studies from undergrad into postgrad study, I wanted to continue to develop and grow my design  style, without necessarily being subjected to the constraints of a brands style, not yet anyway, next year may be a different situation!

So at this moment in time, like I explained within my Social Media and Visual Analysis blogpost I would eventually go on to, I'm developing both my design development packs for both underwear as outerwear.Although a number of designs will be picked from both packs and will ultimately be placed together to create three different outfits, at this stage, I thought the best way to adapt my ideas and deigns clearly was by doing two different design development packs.

This has proven really beneficial at this moment in time, and I think will be even more beneficial when it comes down to flicking through designs and picking those that I will manufacture in Term 3, even if I am yet to start my outerwear development pack! oops, although I'm not too concerned about this at the minute, as I've got some firm ideas forming already in my mind from considering what will work well with various different underwear elements I've designed as well as design ideas generated from both my trend and social media and visual analysis research.

Within my development packs, there's somewhat of a three step stage in terms of how I'm creating my silhouettes and then developing them and moving them forward into actual designs to include visual aspects of my primary research gathered from my "Into Bloom" sketchbook which is primarily based upon flowers and floral patterns. The three different stages of my current underwear development pack can be seen below.


Steph 1 - Basic Silhouettes; The starting point of all designers new projects, the basic silhouettes section of my design development pack takes silhouettes from various research including trend and visual and social media analysis, to create basic shapes and designs of underwear in it's simplest from e.g. without any detailing or textile techniques.

Step 2 - Detailed Silhouettes; Takes the basic silhouettes we see within step 1, and my primary research sketches scanned in from my "Into Bloom" sketchbook and uses Photoshop to combine the two together, give me a better visual interpretation of what the final garment could look like if manufactured.

Step 3 - Close up's; Takes a closer look at a few of my favourite designs including a more in-depth analysis on the details of that particular piece of underwear and also a back and front view.

So that's just a brief look into my design development process so far. Not only will this type of practise led research help me to ultimately reach my end goal of creating a three outfit underwear as outerwear collection for varying boob size women, but it'll also be very helpful to use as part of my focus group next term, to see which designers my consumer like the most and would themselves potentially want to buy if they were manufactured.

Jess xo