As technology advances so does fashion. Digital patterns are quickly becoming an industry standard and although they don’t detract from the trade and skill of traditional drafting upon paper, they do offer their positives within the industry.

Once your paper patterns are signed off and finalised it may be time for you to digitise. Converting hard copies into digital format not only minimises the risk of damage or loss to the master copy but enables you to back up the patterns on a hard drive, duplicate copies and make amendments to the patterns without increasing labour hours tracing and of course they completely abolish postal lead times when liaising with manufacturers. Not only does this mean anyone producing in China can converse with the factory in the morning and have your line under production by the afternoon (this crazy 2019, am I right?!) but your carbon footprint is avoided through air mail services.

Common formats include .PDF .DXF and .SWG - the former can be rendered in such a way you can even print them off at home through a standard A4 printer (or take it to your local print shop for an A0 copy), this is exactly what my company Digital Pattern Library is built upon.