Fashion designer Judi: My method for organizing design inspirations

The Fabrie team is thrilled to have invited fashion designer Judi to share her method of using Fabrie to organize inspiration and materials. We hope these techniques will be helpful to everyone. This article is shared by Judi and edited by the Fabrie team.

Introduce yourself

Hey everyone, I’m Judi, with loads of experience in the fashion design game. I usually roll with the design crew at the company, getting into the nitty-gritty of new collections and snapping Lookbooks. To keep things fresh and surprising, I’m all about soaking in concepts, styles, and elements. That’s why collecting inspo and materials is basically my daily bread.

Now, let’s talk method. A killer inspo stash needs a plan. It’s like an instant zap back to that “aha” moment, or a turbocharged search route when you’re hunting for a specific vibe. I’ve tried a bunch of tools to keep my inspo game tight, and Fabrie is my current top pick. I’ll break it down more in a sec.

How did you organize inspirations before using Fabrie?

I used to rely on tools like Pinterest and Eagle for gathering materials – they’re quick for snagging images and have tagging systems. However, there are some major drawbacks:

• There’s no clear hierarchy or global connections between materials.
• I can’t add diverse annotations to images like text memos or webpage links that would help me remember clues.
• I often extract key info from materials and organize them into checklists, something these tools can’t handle.

I frequently revisit my collected materials, making them a part of me, turning them into something uniquely mine. That’s the core reason I use an inspiration library, and all these issues affect the effectiveness and experience of revisiting materials.

How does Fabrie solve the problem?

These days, I simply slap my fave pics or text onto the Fabrie whiteboard. If something strikes me, I drop comments or ideas with sticky notes – easy and effective. And when new thoughts pop up, I doodle quick notes with the drawing tool, giving my ideas a real boost.

In Fabrie, I can gather materials on the same theme, tweak their sizes to emphasize hierarchy, use lines to show connections between various materials/ideas, and the best part – I can jot down every thought in a table and link each point back to its corresponding material! It’s like having Sherlock Holmes’ memory palace, unraveling the threads, transforming information into a spatial, visual format. You can imagine how excited I was when I discov

Share your method of inpiration management

Oh boy, I’ve learned my lesson about this the hard way (laughs). Collecting materials isn’t a one-and-done deal; it’s all about managing them based on your own needs.

First off, I make it clear that I collect materials to revisit them effectively. For instance, let’s say I’ve already got the theme for the next season from a design meeting, or I’m hunting for patterns with a certain texture. When I return to my inspiration library, the first thing isn’t to “browse,” it’s to “search.” Efficient searching isn’t just about stacking tags or relying on vague memory – Fabrie’s tables help me keep it in check and lay out my thoughts.

After summing things up, I’ve locked in my four most-used tags within the inspiration library:

• Material Content: Usually key phrases like “skin,” “organic texture,” “cyberpunk”… I drag each row’s synced card onto the whiteboard to navigate to the material image when looking at the table.
• Material Theme: Whether out of interest or work needs, there’s always a direction when we gather materials. Personally, I focus on themes like the body, self-awareness, power, and such.
• Material Source: Some materials come from specific artists or websites. If they spark a big inspiration, I jot down their names and URLs to keep following them.
• Material Application: This can span style/color/pattern/texture/technique/concept and more. Noting potential uses and using the table’s filtering feature helps me search the inspiration library more efficiently with a specific purpose in mind.

Once materials are sorted, they’re not just for my eyes. Fabrie docs can be shared with the team for collaborative editing, refining and elevating the content collectively. So, our team members are all on Fabrie, with permissions to peek at each other’s inspiration libraries. Learning from one another, sparking each other’s creativity – a happy team collaboration that ramps up productivity for excellent work!

By the way, I heard that the Fabrie team is working on a plugin for image collection, which would make gathering materials even more convenient. Hoping it goes live soon, haha.