Textile Print Designer — Mood Boards & Repeats

Zoe is a freelance fashion and textile print designer, with over twenty years experience in the fashion and textiles industry. Based in Essex, a short distance from central London, she is available to hire from her own printing studios, or to work in-house when required.

A textile designer needs a good eye for colour and for detail. They create two-dimensional designs to be used as repeats in the fashion industry as well as interior design and furnishings.

Zoe offers a multi-product textile print, design, and development service for designers, fashion startups, small businesses, high street brands, retailers, and individual clients.

• Multiple Products: Zoe's work covers surface pattern design for multiple products, including rugs, throws, towels, curtains, upholstery, bespoke wall hangings, soft furnishings, and custom textiles for clothing brands.

Whatever your product, your textile print is vitally important to get right. It can really make or break any style or range. The correct print can elevate a simple design from something quite mundane to something stunning and very commercial. A signature print style can give your brand a strong sense of identity and individuality when repeated through a range of products and styles.

• Fashion Prints: Zoe has a solid background in the fashion and textiles industry, having worked on fabric printing for womenswear, childrenswear, and menswear. She has a highly distinctive commercial handwriting across florals, animal prints, abstracts, vintage, conversational pieces, and more.

Mood Board Creation: Clients are encouraged to create a mood board to help provide inspiration, focus, and direction, as well as to convey their ideas to colleagues and buyers. Mood boards are essential if you are unsure of what direction to develop the prints for your product or need your ideas focused. Zoe can help you create a customised mood board based on the client's brief.

A mood board may be a seasonal mood board for a range of products, including artwork, colour palettes, sketches, and fabrics. Zoe offers a mood board creation service that can direct and inspire you. She can create a board based on your own design brief, research new ideas, and collate them in an easy-to-understand format for you. This can either be product-driven, such as a motif based on your print for an existing pyjama range, or theme-driven, i.e., ideas based on a vintage floral.

Research: In order to create an effective mood board, it is necessary to collect useful information over a period of time. The best textile designers and creative entrepreneurs need to be constantly collecting examples of interesting and unusual designs from all sorts of sources. This aids in providing inspiration for future design projects. Researching design trends is an essential part of the job and is an ongoing process.

Designs: Once you have created your mood board and discussed your thoughts with Zoe, you should have a clear idea of what you want and the direction you want to take. Zoe will then create a production-ready print for you, based on your own ideas and inspirations.

Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop: Computer-aided design (CAD) enables textile designers to use their creativity to the fullest. Zoe creates all her print designs on either Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. They come in repeat and colour-separated layers where possible.

Creating a Repeat Design: For a large piece of fabric to be printed continuously and smoothly, the design must be printed using a series of identical repeat tiles that form a seamless overall design. Each tile edge flows into each other tile edge. This can be a very tricky and time-consuming process, depending on the complexity of the design. Each tile needs to be checked meticulously to ensure that it repeats flawlessly.

All Over Print Design: All-Over-Prints (AOP) are widely used for different types of products, especially in streetwear products such as T-shirts, hoodies, and sweatshirts, where both front and back are printed, using screen printing, or alternatively, digital or sublimation printing.

Direct to Garment Printing: Direct-To-Garment printing (DTG) is not limited to specific print areas.

Print Direction: Zoe can discuss with you and advise on print direction and layout. This will definitely affect the look of the garment but can also dramatically affect the fabric costing. A directional, or one-way print, is where a fabric has a clear up and down to the pattern. In a one-way print, all motifs face in the same direction. In a non-directional fabric, or two-way print, motifs are facing two ways. We can also advise on the layout and spacing of border prints.

Colour Separated Layers: For ease of colour change, most of our prints have each colour separated, so that it is easy to play around with colour ways by changing each colour individually. This is important if you are planning on rotary printing your fabric, as each screen will be a separate colour.

Using Pantone Colour References: Colours can look very different onscreen to real life, so it is important to ensure that printers have a good reference for the colours you choose. This is where Pantone is essential. Pantone is a colour matching system developed in 1950. Instead of having to describe to your printer what type of colour you are looking for, you can provide a Pantone code for a very specific colour. This is also important if you want to give the printers Pantone references for the colours you choose. This is normally a good idea, as colours can look very different on screen to real life. This isn't possible in all styles of print, but this will be explained at the beginning of the process where this isn't possible or needed.

Scale: Scale is so important for prints and very easy to get wrong. Zoe will help you decide on the right scale for your product and ensure that the print files reflect this. If you are rotary screen printing, she will ensure that your print files are the correct size for the screens.

Development of Bought Prints: Zoe can also help you develop a print you have bought as an idea or a vintage find into a workable commercial print. Sometimes prints bought from designers are sold as just ideas but are not actually workable – they are not in a repeat format, or you may have just liked one element of the design, but not the whole look as is. We can offer you a service to take elements of your chosen design and work this into a print for your product, or the design as a whole but make it workable. Creating colour-separated and repeat designs takes a lot longer than just coming up with the idea alone, so often print houses won't include this in the price of the design.

Using Vintage Sample Prints: You may have a lovely vintage print that you have bought or sourced and want this developed into a print you can use. This is definitely something we can do for you.

Textile Printing Tuition: Zoe offers one-to-one tuition for anyone interested in learning textile print design. Classes can be face to face in Essex or online via Zoom.

How do I become a fabric print designer? The long way would be to obtain a degree, as most positions require a degree in textile design. A fashion and textiles degree takes at least three years to achieve. Many universities will give you the option of a sandwich degree, which would increase the course length to four years. You don't need a degree to become a textile designer. You just need some design talent and a willingness to learn. A potential employer does not really care about your qualifications. They only care about what you can do and what you can do for them. A good portfolio is far more valuable than a degree.