3 Keys to unlocking

design creativity and

productivity

aquario DESIGN®Textile and fashion plug-ins for Adobe

Table of contents

Introductions............................................................................................5

Unleash Creativity in Textile Designs.......................................................7

User Testimonials......................................................................................8

Reduce Design Time................................................................................12

Design in a Connected Environment.......................................................16

Contact Us................................................................................................18

Take off the creative handcuffs

In today’s dynamic textile and apparel industry, you need to bring innovative designs to market quickly. Whether you are working on next year’s collection, taking advantage of fast fashion or addressing the

newest fad in fashion, using the latest design tools and techniques will help you take time and steps out of the

process, getting better designs to market faster.

The articles in this magazine will discuss how the latest software tools in Aquario Design suite will unleash your

design creativity and efficiency.

Unleash creativity in textile design

Use Aquario Design to explore options and unleash your creativity.

Choose to use existing patterns by scanning images or create brand-new art freehand. The multiple creation tools produce stunning design results in minutes.

Experiment with as many designs as you like and choose the best ones for the design review process.

Test your creativity with unique weaves, plaids, knits and more.

Try out repeat patterns ‘till your heart’s content. Adjust how graphic elements appear and see everything happen in real time.

Use all the colors you want without the need to revert to indexed color and save as many colorways as you like. You can eve have the software suggest some that you may not have thought of!

Ashlyn BeckSenior Stylist at Springs Creative

User testimonials

Ashlyn BECK SENIOR STylistSPRINGS CREAtive

Ashlyn Beck, Senior Stylist at Springs Creative

Ashlyn Beck, an Aquario Design user, notes that she has been able to save hours on complex patterns with half drops. “It’s so easy now,” she says, “I can do a half drop or quarter drop by row or by column. With a complex pattern, it used to take me as much as an hour. Now it’s 5-10 minutes. Depending on my workload, I was able to do 3 to 4 designs per day before. Now I can do 9 to 12 - three times as many without the headaches!” Another benefit for Ashlyn is the ability to keep Illustrator designs in vector form for faster, easier scaling without risking rough edges.

As a designer, you don’t want to feel like an assembly line worker - cranking out designs as fast as possible. But neither do you want to spend time doing a lot of boring, repetitive, nonproductive tasks. Time to market is critical, but you should not be under such pressure that designing becomes burdensome or you feel your creativity is stifled.

These tools transform the tedious and time consuming processes of textile and fashion design into a flexible and responsive approach that let’s you try out different ideas more quickly with instant results. Finalizing designs becomes fast and easy as well, and leaving plenty of time and energy for your creative juices to flow.

Brendan Rauth Men’s Apparel Designer at United By Blue

BRENDAN RAUTHMen’S APPAREL DESIGNER UNITED BY BLUE

Brendan Rauth, Men’s Apparel Designer at United By Blue

Brendan Rauth cites automation of color pitch-outs as a huge time savings. “We used to have to manually pitch out every color, but now that process is automated. There are other processes automated as well that save even more time, such as scaling. This also reduces errors because the program is automatically entering the data, and the risk of typos is vastly reduced.”

Brendan notes that the efficiency in pitch-outs as well as the ability to bring work in-house were two of the key decision factors in adopting Aquario Design at United By Blue.

“Since we work with factories around the globe, when you send them pitches, they likely won’t see them for 12 hours,” he comments. “Then it is another 12 hours before we get their feedback. So you lose a whole day if there is even one little typo. We rarely see that kind of delay anymore now that we are using Aquario..

The technology you need to speed up your creativityWe’ll show you how you can produce more creative designs by:

• Using as many colors as you wish• Visualizing repeats as you design• Leveraging a system that presents all colorways options with a single click

You’ll learn how to achieve predictable and stunning colors by:

• Communicating color consistently, even across a global supply chain • Quickly matching RGB or CMYK color to proprietary systems• Creating color palettes that can be shared throughout all stages of product development

The result is a faster, more innovative design process that allows you to::

• Create stunning textile designs• Easily translate designs to garment sketches and storyboards• Tie the workflow together in a high-efficiency, connected way

Drastically reduce design timeRecoloring

You can recolor channels by simply clicking on a color chip inside the swatches list. This allows you to create multiple colorways without a complicated or cumbersome workflow. You can even shuffle colors within the colorway with the click of a mouse and see results immediately. Don’t like it? No problem. A click or two lets you see a new colorway or go back to where you were. Plus, you are not limited in the number of colors you can use

For Brendan Rauth, this recoloring capability not only results in better designs, but reduces costs as well. “Because the software has tools to both build a color palette internally as well as a feature to randomize colors you like,” he says, “you can look at a number of options before committing to any development in a factory. We have partnerships with factories in a half dozen countries, and when you send options to them for development, there are fees involved. We can narrow down the number of options we want to explore before ever getting the factory involved, and that is huge.”

Because designers love the Adobe suite of design tools, most textile and apparel designers prefer to work with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Using Aquario Design plug-ins provides an optimal workflow that specifically addresses the needs of textile designers, augmenting the Adobe capabilities to eliminate frustrations that can occur when using a more limiting set of tools.

In the past, users often had to invest in additional systems that were not well integrated with the Adobe environment, requiring a long learning curve and switching between multiple applications. These proprietary systems are also frequently too costly, especially for independent designers or smaller brands and design firms. However, with the availability of newer tools that are better integrated into the Adobe suite, all of that has changed.

Creating a fabric design with repeats, drops, weaves, colorways and more using just Illustrator and Photoshop can be time consuming. And, if you want to make a change, it’s not always easy to step back to where you need to make the change. In fact, in many cases, it’s easier to start over. That’s why using specialized tools that operate as plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop and/or Illustrator can increase your productivity. As a designer, you can continue to work in the familiar Adobe environment but have access to many tools designed specifically for textiles, providing you with the capabilities you have only dreamed about!

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“We can narrow down the number of options we want to explore before ever getting the factory involved, and that’s huge.”

BRENDAN RAUTHMEN’S APPAREL DESIGNERUNITED BY BLUE

Custom Development

With Aquario Design, many common integrations are already in place, and the talented professional services team at Aquario stands ready to provide custom development if you need new workflows currently unavailable or want to make existing ones easier to use. We analyze your workflow and streamline it with integrations that automate tedious and time consuming processes to make your life easier. Aquario Design integrations currently include solutions for multiple PLM providers. Aquario professional services experts also have experience integrating Aquario with Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Extension Manager, InDesign, Experience Manager and Bridge. This allows you to access multiple Adobe tools with one central integrated solution.

“We have as many as 5 to 10 palettes each season. Now we create them faster and share them with the team easily.”

ASHLYN BECKSENIOR STYLISTSPRINGS CREATIVE

Ashlyn Beck, Senior Stylist at Springs Creative, uses Aquario Design to create or update seasonal palettes. “We can have as many as 5 to 10 palettes each season,” she notes. “Now, not only can we create them faster, giving us more flexibility in our collections, but it is also extremely easy to share them with the team.” She also loves the ability to print out color chips. “They are a great color communication tool,” she says. “I can choose my colors and then automatically create a set of chips that gives me a choice of a range of similar colors and tones. That let’s us pick the exact right color during the development process. Then we send the final color chip to our factories for them to match. This is a process that was completely manual before. We had to create each square individually. It took hours. Now it’s automatic, with results delivered in minutes.”

Design in a connected environment

Create production-ready designs

The final step in the design process is generating a production-ready file that will ensure manufacturing meets the design intent. This presents a whole other set of challenges. You begin by creating a multi-channel file; a process simplified by using the Aquario Design RSe Separation tool.

Separation Tool

You eyedrop the shades from original artwork and Aquario Design automatically creates the spot-color channels in a new file. The preview gives a real-time look at the new separations, plus all of the channel information is automatically saved for future recoloring and other production-preparation steps.

Print Production Tool

Next, the RSe Print Production tool automates presentation options (sometimes called color pitch-outs) for production and final send-off. It generates text fields automatically with check boxes for the file name, colorway name, dimensions and date.

You can automatically add file margins and chip information with just one click. All options are also fully customizable and editable after the file is generated.

You can save and use different templates on multiple types of designs while sharing them instantly with the rest of the team.

Design In a Connected Environment

Connectivity tools

Brendan Rauth, Men’s Apparel Designer at United By Blue, points out that Aquario’s connectivity tools are a big time saver. “If you have a large team, everyone spread across the globe,” he says, “you can quickly and efficiently update everyone’s color palettes, rather than having to do it computer by computer. We typically have seasonal palettes and we can easily build those and push them out. That’s not intuitive in Adobe. I wouldn’t even know how to do that; so it’s an easy way to take advantage of big savings of time across the board.”

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To find out how you can unlock your design creativity and productivity,

please visit aquariodesign.com

Contact UsEmail: aquariodesign.com

Phone: 212.391.2370

What better way to end this discussion than by citing real world experience from a designer using Aquario Design suite. Here’s what Rhonda schetman, senior designer at alphi apparel group, has to say:

“The Aquario Design suite has become indispensable to me. This easy and affordable design suite allows me to create designs I was unable to create before. Designing take a fraction of the time. I can be more creative and the tools are a pleasure to use.”