Textile Print Designer — Mood Boards & Repeats

318. 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 repeat used in 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.

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.

Zoe has a solid background in the fashion and textiles industry, having worked on fabric printing for womenswear, children swear, and menswear. She has a highly distinctive commercial handwriting, across florals, animal prints, abstracts, vintage, conversational pieces…The list goes on.

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 focussed.

Zoe can help you create a customised mood board based on the clients 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, ie, ideas based on a vintage floral.

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. This is an ongoing process.

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 direcction you want to take. Zoe will then create a production ready print for you, based on your own ideas and inspirations.

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.

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-Prints (AOP) is 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 (DTG ) is not limited to specific…