Wearing Your Heart On Your Sleeve: Initial Design Ideas

When beginning my design ideas I thought about how I would make it have an obvious visual link with the MS Society. I decided that I wanted to use the house colours (orange, black and white) and the logo - especially the jagged M. I began by drawing, as this is how I initiate ideas, and I just put the colours and shapes together on the body without considering the shape of the garment itself at this point.

As I began doing more and more sketches I tried out different shapes, as well as trying the design onto other items such as a tote bag and a phone case, to see if these products did interest me. However I came back to garment again, as I thought I would, and I noticed that my designs seemed very sportswear-like. I thought this would be a good theme to pursue product-wise as there are lots of sports events, such as marathons, cycling and hiking, that people can get involved with to fundraise for the MS Society. The existing sportswear is also rather garish so I thought it would be interesting to try and reinvent it.

I then decided to do some research into current sportswear to see what fabrics and colours are used. I discovered a lot of mesh fabric, and a lot of monochrome.

This research linked well with my designs as black and white are colours the MS Society uses, so I could just add orange to make the garment more vibrant. Looking at all the garments that use mesh also gave me inspiration for fabrics. So far I'd only worked on shapes and colours in my designs and not thought about fabrics, therefore I decided to incorporate mesh into my sketches.

As I continued to play around I began to notice that I was drifting further and further away from the charity. I ended up just having a black mesh sports top with the jagged part of the M down the middle, which didn't really provide a visual association to the MS Society. I therefore went back to trying to include the M and the S from the logo, and began working from a zoomed in section of the end of the M and the beginning of the S. I also then tried incorporating all the colours (black, white and orange) with the mesh and I played around with the shaping of the top.

I ended up with a sketch I was rather pleased with, that I felt could work and had a visual association with the charity. I decided to then develop this design.