CAD - fashion technical design, Illustrator flats and tech packs

03 entries

Where a drawing stops being a drawing and becomes something a factory can build.

CAD Portfolio

Semester project · 2025

A full women's line, drawn flat, over a semester in Illustrator.

Nostalgic Summers line sheet with four complete looks drawn as technical flats — The full line

Role: CAD · Illustration · Line Development
Year: 2025

A semester-long women's line built entirely in Illustrator, from the mood board and target market through to every flat.

The drawing is the easy part to see and the hard part to do well. Custom patterns, brushes and symbols do the work: a stitch brush built once stays identical across every flat in the line, and symbols mean a change to one hardware detail updates everywhere it appears. Consistency across a line is a systems problem before it is a drawing problem.

Drag the strip. Every one of these came out of the same small library of parts.

Mood and market first

The line opens with mood and target market because every flat after it is accountable to those two pages. If a garment cannot be justified against them, it does not belong in the line.

Patterns, brushes, symbols

Building a library first is slower at the start of a line and much faster for everything after it. It is also the only way a line reads as one line: identical topstitch weight, identical hardware, identical seam language, because they are literally the same object reused.

Technical flats of three colourways of a tailored blazer, striped shirt and wide-leg trouser

Technical flats of peplum camisoles and tiered maxi skirts in pink, blue and white

Tech Pack

Production documentation · 2025

The document that decides whether a factory builds what you drew.

Tech sketch of a shirt, front and back, with lettered callouts and points-of-measure tables — Front, back, and every measurement between

3 construction details - hover or tab through

Role: Technical Design · Specification
Year: 2025

A tech pack is where a design stops being yours. Everything you do not specify, somebody else decides.

This one is built around production detail: measurements, construction callouts, materials. The discipline is writing down the things that feel obvious - because obvious is exactly what gets substituted on a factory floor you will never stand in.

The drawing is what I wanted. The spec is what actually gets made.

Why the detail is the point

The gap between a good tech pack and a bad one is not draughtsmanship. It is how many decisions the document makes on your behalf versus how many it quietly hands to somebody else.

Reading it two ways

The same sheet has to serve two readers: the designer checking the garment is still the garment, and the maker who needs a number for every dimension and a name for every seam. The toggle above switches between what each of them actually looks at.

Brand Identity

Identity system · 2025

A logo is a promise you have to print on something eventually.

Mark, card, labels, tags

Role: Identity · Print · Art Direction
Year: 2025

Logo, business card, swing tags. The identity is only finished when it survives being manufactured.

A mark that works on a screen and falls apart at swing-tag scale is not done. The tag is the real test: a piece of card punched with a hole, hung on a thread, and read at arm's length on a rail with fifty others.

The tag is the smallest thing the mark has to survive. It is also the first thing a buyer touches.

Printed, not emitted

A tag is printed rather than emitted. Ink on card in bad light is a different problem from a mark on a backlit screen, and it is the harder of the two.

Card and mark

The business card and the primary mark carry the same system at their own scales. The test is the same each time: nothing in it should exist only at presentation scale.

Next chapter

03Digital Content

The clothes move. Somebody has to decide how they are seen moving.

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