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By Steven Roback

While most of us are making our summer plans, Christy Z. Hutchins already has fall on her mind: fall 2001, that is. Hutchins, a textile merchandising and design consultant who specializes in high-performance athletic clothing, is helping a client design next year's fall line of sports apparel. Her products, which range from cross-training shorts and tops to lightweight water-resistant rainwear, sport high-tech fabrics that wick moisture away from the body. But fabrics aren't the only high-tech aspect of Hutchins' creations — she uses digital tools extensively throughout the production process.

To learn how to integrate graphics software into her design business, Hutchins turned to a school run by Monarch Design Systems, a Glendale, New York-based company that creates computer-aided design and manufacturing systems for the textile and apparel industry.

"Monarch's goal is to make you productive in the textile and design industry," says Hutchins, who took separate courses in Adobe® Illustrator® and Adobe Photoshop® software aimed at textile designers. The students learned how to create different textures, simulate a knit appearance, execute drop shadows for depth, and generate repeat patterns.

Hutchins has woven many of the techniques she learned at Monarch into her design practice. When designing garments, such as shirts, shorts, or jackets, she uses basic silhouettes in Illustrator as a starting template and adapts new designs from them. Or she may scan and trace quick thumbnail sketches into Illustrator. "I use vector-based programs because I prefer the versatility and control," she says. "You can enlarge, reduce, move or recolor without changing the nature or clarity of the work. File sizes are small, and the final presentation retains exact pen lines."

Hutchins uses Illustrator software's transform tool to scale, rotate, and flip objects and the Group command to move or color multiple objects. The Mask command lets her fill in areas of the garment with a scanned print or one of her own patterns. And the measure tool helps her give garment manufacturers accurate dimensions for each piece.

To create pattern fills for her vector sketches, Hutchins scans and manipulates images in Photoshop. She reduces a scan from 256 colors to between three and six, depending on the desired effect. She then isolates images from the background with masks and uses the Define Pattern and Fill commands to generate a new bitmap fill.

At Monarch, Hutchins also learned how to use her Photoshop designs as the CAD component in a CAD/CAM system: She designs patterns for plush fleece fabrics in Photoshop and then submits the designs to a knitting mill as BMP files, which the mill's software uses to produce the actual fabric. "I'm on my way to producing full-width, engineered patterns that can be sent to the client's mill of choice," she says, "or even two different mills, if dual production is needed to fill orders."

Hutchins uses Photoshop software's layers feature to control design elements and simplify changes in lines and coloration. And when she get a little carried away with her creative inspiration, the History palette lets her jump back as many as 20 steps in an image's evolution. "It's invaluable to save work at a certain point while playing with an idea," she says. "Sometimes it is best not to overthink a project."