WIP: Concept Canvas

A workflow tool to gather inspiration for fashion designers

About this time a year ago, my friend — now — girlfriend, Kristin Shore and I were discussing each other’s design processes and she relented about the struggle to find quality, unique inspiration for her work. As a fashion designer, her work is multi-layered, and could be comparable to a product designer specializing in physical goods or a concept artist. Each of these disciplines require a keen understanding of texture, color, materials, fabrication, and a mastery of organic forms in three-dimensional space.

The most common ways to find many of these resources are through expensive and time consuming means:

• Go to a repository to pay for credits and purchase textures that may or may not be useful (especially for 3D artists who employ texture mapping or fashion designers who specialize in programs like Marvelous Designer)
• Seek out materials in the real world. Fashion designers visit textile mills or fabric/garment shops like Mood or Katsu NY, but they are only as good as your location. For designers who live in rural areas or places outside of NY, & LA (if in America), getting materials can be a very tall order.
• Other online resources like Niice and Designspiration are purely 2D based and don’t provide the tactile support fashion designers need to influence their projects.

So we thought to ourselves, how can we provide a 3D tactile experience to the research and exploration stages of a project? So we incepted, Concept Canvas. a web & mobile tool that takes advantage of the 3D capabilities of the iPhone and iPad to deliver a tactile experience to a designer.

That’s not the only core element to the canvas, we aim to capture the moment inspiration strikes and make the user interface as clean and raw as possible. We are also ambitious in creating a seamless transition into most digital workflows for fashion designers like asset management and textures for rendering or importing color palettes for work in Photoshop and Illustrator.

We’re trying to push 3D / Force Touch + Haptic Feedback to it’s limits.

I can’t wait to show you what we have in store.

Currently, the product is in the validation stage followed with a beta in 2017. I’ll be working on a launch site in the coming months. Keep it locked!

Ameer Carter is co-founder of the mother/son dual purpose consultancy KM&A, bridging the gap between design and industrial & organizational psychology to inspire businesses to build better selves, thoughtful leadership and products for others. We are currently scouting projects within Fashion, E-Sports, Education and Manufacturing industries and AR/VR environments.

For all contact, reach out at ameer@kma.agency