During a recent CITDA (Computer Integrated Textile and Design Association) conference in New York City, textile and clothing designers were asked the question "Which comes first, design or computer skills?" The quest was to determine from the perspective of today’s creative professionals, which is the foundation for success and which is the value added skillset.
Sentiment rang strongly among the nearly 100 attendees that a computer design program "does not a designer make." Not only do today’s designers view the computer as a tool with which they can express their design skills, but an increasing number understand both the importance and opportunity that integrating computer-aided-design (CAD) with computer-aided-manufacturing (CAM) can provide. The designer that can not only push the design envelope, but can push that envelope all the way through the production process is the designer that will make his or her mark in the design world.
The consummate example of the technology driven designer is Jhane Barnes, the award winning menswear designer who weaves her own personal formula of thread, warp, weft, color, surface design, computer technology and math to produce her textiles. Math, you ask?
While most designers will look at a rainbow, a shape, a flower or any other concrete object for inspiration, Jhane is driven by more obscure stimuli such as patterns in fractal books, symmetries, algorithms or the angle of light reflecting off of an object. It’s how she plays these inspirations against the computer and the loom that tells an interesting story.
Though a star in her own right, one of Barnes’ childhood celestial aspirations was to become an astrophysicist. Her love for math and science were in stark contrast to her love for designing and making her own clothes, a skill that provided for some early recognition and success that sealed her destiny.
She became frustrated early in her career by her inability to find the kind of textiles she was looking for and says she learned the art of weaving from "books, mills and by making mistakes." The 45-year-old designer began using computers in the early 1980s, when she was among the first to own a weaving program that allowed her Atari computer to drive her handloom.
She is emphatic about her belief that the technical weaving skills she developed in those early years are not only the foundation of her success, but the missing formula for many of today’s designers. "Most textiles happen accidentally because the designer doesn’t have the technical production knowledge and the mills don’t have the creative capabilities to accurately interpret the design sketch," says Jhane. By designing with the use of computer software that allows her to control both the design and the production processes, Jhane has complete control over the outcome of products that will proudly bear her name.
While she and her staff of 10 designers have used many of the surface design and weaving applications on the market, she is fiercely loyal to both the applications from and the relationship with Designer Software of Syracuse, NY (www.weavemaker.com). She makes intense use of their flagship programs Surface Magic™ and WeaveMaker™, and has substantially influenced the way the software has been developed.
To understand the relationship, it is important to understand the driving force behind Jhane’s design inspirations. When Jhane is in the creative process, she thinks about not just color, yarn, pattern and texture, but about symmetries, rules and generators.
Symmetry is a mechanism for superimposing the entire plane on itself without changing the original motif or pattern. The seventeen symmetries that exist for a two dimensional infinite plane such as fabric include design concepts like mirroring, sliding, rotation, and repeat.
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By combining her knowledge of design and symmetry,
Jhane will create rules that will define the actual construction of
a design. Rules define such items as the size of squares or circles,
the width of lines, the number of colors, the size of the repeat, the
float in the weave and the symmetry to be applied. These rules, which
are constantly evolving and being added to Jhane’s proprietary
copies of Surface Magic™ and WeaveMaker™, include instructions
such as shearing stripes where the odds shear but the evens stay put,
repeatedly reducing the size of a design on itself, or guiding the rearrangement
of a design motif with a space filling curve (samples shown), which
was inspired by a math book on fractals.
These symmetries and rules must be written into software that will not only produce the desired visual effect and allow Jhane to apply color to the results, but provide weaving direction based on such technical details as the number of harnesses, the number of colors, the weave construction, etc. Since the number of harnesses is contingent on the mill in which the fabric will be produced, this variable is not often known during the design process.
Jhane applauds the flexibility of WeaveMaker,™ which allows her to see the effect on a design as, for example, the number of harnesses is changed. She also exploits this capability, as the software allows her to design as if there were an unlimited number of harnesses, a "virtual dobby loom" if you will. While she knows she must eventually reduce the number of harnesses to match production, the freedom to temporarily suspend real-world limits in the initial design process only enhances her creativity and provides the opportunity to develop the unusual designs that have become her trademark.
Much of her work actually starts in SurfaceMagic,™ a very inexpensive ($185, Macintosh and Windows) surface design program for pattern or jacquard design development on knit and woven fabrics. Features include: automatic pattern creation, automatic repeats, absolute color control, resolution control, the ability to define the shape of the individual pixels, masking and layers. The software supports the ability to create proprietary pattern generators, a feature that Jhane has exploited more than most. She has also taken full advantage of her relationship with Designer Software by assisting them to develop their products around the intuitive and creative thought processes of a designer. She doesn't like to read a user's manual, and rarely does.
When Designer Software owners Dana Cartwright and Bill Jones talk about their relationship with Jhane, the tone in their voices resembles that of proud parents. Their relationship goes back to 1992, when Jhane first discovered their software at a trade show. Since then, each has had a profound influence on the other.
As the chief software architect, Dana is responsible for adding features to the software, such as the saving of thumbnails or the addition of weave capabilities. Bill, as a mathematician, is responsible for writing the software pattern generators that Jhane dreams up from her unique integration of symmetries and fractals. The three provide an unusual combination of skills that, by all accounts, provides for a free flow of creative inspiration in all directions.
Jhane has recently completed a project that is not only unique, but also quite an honor. When the State of Ohio developed an initiative to improve both the interest and test scores in math of middle and high school children, their search for real world applications led them to Jhane Barnes. In co-operation with Ohio teachers and Designer Software, Jhane has developed a series of lesson plans that will teach students how to apply math in the world of textile design. It is supported by a 20-minute video of Jhane seen working at her computer and at the mills. It also includes a series of workbooks that will assist students in applying math to real world weaving situations.
In the world of apparel and textile designs, where "knock-offs" are so common one might think it was an actual business process, designers and manufacturers alike have learned to guard their creativity and work product. The question remains, why would Jhane Barnes be so willing to tell the world how she does what she does?
Jhane explains that the process of sharing her unique insights only serves to boost her creativity. While she herself has trained many of her staff, she has found her style and technique to be often imitated, but never duplicated. As Bill Jones puts it "Jhane is one of a kind."
As her story demonstrates, and the designers at CITDA have concluded, design software is only as good as the creativity of the person who operates it, but having the right tools in hand is essential for any successful designer.
Teri Ross is a writer, speaker and consultant on new
technology for the sewn products industries. She is owner and President
of Imagine That!
