CAD Systems in Designing and Apparel Production

Computer Aided Designing(CAD) is a mainstream tool; companies that hope to compete in the fashion market place, especially at the mass level, cannot prosper without some level of CAD technology. And for an aspiring designer, it is an added advantage to have basic knowledge of Fashion CAD. In textile designing CAD systems, a motif can be designed, resized, re-colored, rotated, or multiplied depending on the design goal. Some garment designers are more comfortable drawing fashion illustrations using CAD rather than by hand drawing and coloring. Fashion Illustrators are often trained as graphic designers.

The CAD course at Vogue Institute of Fashion Technology provides a platform for students to get trained in CAD programs like Auto CAD and CorelDraw for drawing, paint program like Adobe Photoshop, and Lectra. Each program will have its own particular functions, but in most cases, for representational purposes, a student will be able to achieve the results with a combination of drawing and paint programs.

Advantages of CAD

Making a pattern for a style takes about an hour and the grading process assuming there are five sizes would take another hour. Using a CAD system will reduce the time spent on making the patterns. Patterns once created for a particular style can be stored for eternity in space saving hard disks or floppies instead of storing physical patterns. And just imagine storing physical patterns and retrieving them after a lot of searching only to find they are defaded or torn! One can imagine the waste of time, space and cost when a company is dealing with thousands of styles. There are variations of CAD systems available for apparel production. Lectra’s CAD solutions, for example, focus on the product development lifecycle, from creation of the product to fabric cutting.

Supposing a designer wants to redesign one of the core products, he need not have to start from scratch. He can start with the silhouette developed last season, retrieve it from his design database, redevelop it in minutes, automatically update the collection database and push it directly to the supplier with all the specification data.