Advocacy by Design / Lesson 7 of 17 · Design It
Sketch to Story
Time to design your piece. Not build — design. The cheapest place to make mistakes is on paper, and good designers make lots of them there on purpose.
Ideas are the point, drawing isn’t
If sketching intimidates you, use a croquis — the fashion world’s pre-drawn figure. Print the Croquis Figures sheet, lay a blank page on top, trace the figure, and design on the tracing. Nobody at MakeFashion Edu has ever been graded on anatomy. Ideas count; rendering doesn’t.
Then open the Design Notes sheet and let it be messy: fragments, arrows, doodles, crossed-out versions. Design notes are thinking made visible, not an essay.
Sketch like our students do
Our designers’ finished pieces almost never match their first sketch — and that’s the system working. Wings that started as cardboard became fabric over a frame. A “dress with lights” became Mother Earth with a glowing crown. The sketch’s job is to be a conversation starter between you, your team, and your materials.
Sketch at least three different versions before choosing. The first idea is usually the most obvious one — which means it’s the one the audience has already seen.
Two design rules from a hundred runway pieces
- Decide where the light lives, on paper, now. Retrofitting a circuit onto a finished garment is the most common painful surprise in this course. Your sketch should mark battery, lights, and switch like a treasure map.
- It sometimes goes backwards, and that’s fine. Some designers get a design idea first and find the story after. Don’t force the order — but do finish with both a sketch and a story in writing.
Start your artist statement now
Write one paragraph: what this piece argues, and why it matters to us. It’s a draft — it will change as the piece does — but teams that write it now build more coherent pieces than teams that write it the night before the show. You’ll polish it in the final module.
For teachers: Require the three-version rule; it’s where the real ideation happens. The croquis unlocks students who “can’t draw” — announce it before anyone has a chance to opt out. Design notes make an excellent artifact for the exhibition display later, so have teams keep everything, including rejects.