Having now completed my Trend book I am very pleased with the overall outcome, it has taken a lot of work and time, but I feel I have produced a piece of work that shows this all and that I am proud of. I feel that I have planned my time extremely well and have found myself finished with time to go over my book thoroughly and to make sure it is finalised and completed to a higher standard of what I had originally expected.
In the beginning I did not feel so confident about this project and found I had no idea of how to approach this brief or where to even start. After getting inspiration from other sources such as Peclers, style.com and CIFF trend reports I finally felt I had a good ground to start on. My first step was to choose my themes for the book: I had already come up with a number of options that needed narrowing down. It took me a long time to decide the final 3 themes to group together with the Origami/Contour Couture theme.
I decided to make the Traces brief a theme within my trend book to keep it related to our ongoing project for this term. I have used this as my first theme to introduce my trend book. As well as this theme I have also chosen ‘Untamed’, ‘Fantasia’ and ‘Treasure’ as my 3 accompanying themes. Within each of these themes I have explained what it is about, inspirations, what the key looks are for clothing and accessories/silhouette for Autumn Winter 2010 (they are ones that I have predicted that will be on trend), and I have drawn illustrations displaying some of theses trends. The images that are included within my trend book are ones that I have found inspirational and ones that I feel the viewer will find inspirational and can get ideas from for creating these looks within my themes.
Once I had decided my themes, it gave me the confidence into starting my real research, this however took a lot longer then I had first expected. I decided to start with my colour palettes for each theme, I got inspiration for these from various trend forecasts, mainly CIFF and Peclers which had colours that they had chosen to be on trend for a/w 10 and I had chosen my own from some of these. I found the pantone references for each colour and have added these onto the trend book too.
I then compiled a large selection of images that I thought might go with each of my trends, images that I just liked or found inspiring. Most of these images came from magazines and the Internet. Collecting these images took a long and finding the right images for each theme was a challenge- it is hard to find ones suitable, or that link with one another to help the book flow, and that convey the right mood for my theme. It was also important to find pictures that portrayed my theme correctly. I want viewers to be able to get the mood and idea behind each of my themes from sight first, and then to reference to/back to my writing to understand them more clearly.
After having compiled a selection of images I had then ended up with more than planned, so this had to be narrowed down, which too was a tricky task. I had to make sure that all the images I had chosen for each theme interlinked with one another and helped to portray and tell my story clearly. After doing this I then started to play around with the layout of my pages on InDesign. I positioned pictures in various places to see where they worked best and which ones I felt were right for my theme. This was one of the most challenging parts and became an ongoing process throughout my trend book. With ever changing positioning and placing of pictures and text. I found I constantly came across images that I felt were better fitting than others whilst surfing the web. In contrast I would also find images that I did not like anymore and had to then delete them and replace with something I felt was better suited.
My writing for the trend book is at the beginning of every theme, and explains what they are about, all of this information is my own, but I had inspiration from other sources such as style.com, Peclers, and other trend reporting websites. They helped me to compile some wording and thoughts of trends that they had predicted to be in for 2010-11. I felt that I needed some help with the writing up for the themes as I did not want to make something up that was of no relevance to what is going on within the ever changing fashion world today, so referencing and getting information from these sites/books helped me to keep on track of the type of items, accessories and materials that they thought would be on trend for next year.
I have also added some items such as buttons, fabric and trinkets/items that I felt helped to express my trends more, and make the book more fun and interactive with the reader. After having done these main processes to my book, the rest was just tweaking, reading through and editing what I had already done, to ensure that the book was to the standard that I was hoping and had expected.
Throughout this project I feel I have increased my knowledge in Adobe Illustrator and with InDesign, I have developed strong skills within this area that I did not have before. I feel comfortable and confident when using both of these programmes which will be useful for the rest of my student life and for future careers. I feel I have also increased my knowledge on layouts, and how to link images and pieces together to tell a story that flows.
In conclusion, I had no real troubles when doing this trend book that set me back or stopped me from doing the work. I felt that this was a very good experience for me and I have learned a lot from this project. It was extremely enjoyable as well as being hard work and tiring, but in the end I am very pleased with what I have produced and I look forward to putting some of these new skills into practice in the future.
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